“Yahoo Together” is a new IRC inspired mobile messenger

Yahoo has just released a new mobile instant messaging app called “Yahoo Together” – but does anyone need it?

In July this year, Yahoo closed one of the first instant messaging apps in the Yahoo Messenger Marketplace. Reason? Disinterest.

Simply put, people have switched to simpler (perhaps safer) solutions. But now the company is back with an all-new app Yahoo Together for mobile and web messaging. It has a new fashionable look and wants to compete in the market of strong players such as Facebook and Snapchat.

Yahoo Together makes no secret of its ambition to compete with every other app on the market, especially Slack, to which the Yohoo app is very similar, although it lacks some features.

The app uses the hash symbol (#) in conversations that people can recognize in the Slack app. But the (#) hashtag was actually introduced for use on IRC networks decades ago – it was used to tag channels, and Yahoo in this case picked up the old idea from IRC. Topic conversations are not only new chats that are configurable by the user, but rather act as subsets of the main group chat.

As for the features, hopefully at least the voice calls will eventually be introduced. In such a huge ocean of mobile communication applications, Yahoo will have a very difficult task to stand out from the competition and get users to start using Yahoo Together …

Yahoo Together is led by the same team that developed Yahoo Messenger. The app had a closed beta earlier this year under the name “Yahoo Squirrel”. Now the application is available to everyone under a new name. You must have a Yahoo account to use Yahoo Together, but you can invite people to your group even if they are not registered. This is done with a personalized code that can be entered by the invited person after logging in.

The app is a bit clunky, although it has a fairly unique feature in the form of smart reminders. Thanks to them, you can set a reminder for any chat message and notify all participants of the selected date and time.

Unfortunately, at least for now, Yahoo Together doesn’t have a desktop or browser version. Yahoo might have been more prudent to at least develop an internet version for its newest service so it doesn’t suffer a similar fate to its predecessor.

The application can be downloaded for free on devices with iOS and Android systems:

source: Yahoo Together (1) via TechCrunch, phoneArena