I recall Yahoo Chat finally shutting down in December of 2012. In a sense, you could see it coming: the messaging protocols were a mess, no real attempt had be

I recall Yahoo Chat finally shutting down in December of 2012. In a sense, you could see it coming: the messaging protocols were a mess, no real attempt had been made against the spambots, the property was poorly managed during that phase where Yahoo was attempting to date anyone, everyone, in order to fix their lives. First they killed the user-made rooms, due to some senseless pedo-panic, then some special interest rooms, and finally the service itself, even as some put-upon employee named "Robin" had to write various upbeat missives about Yahoo improving the service on the Yahoo Messenger Chat blog. You see, they had done one thing really right in the beginning with their chat rooms -- they made a series of location-based rooms, first by continent, then country, then (for the US) state and even occasionally city. So many people either want to talk about what is going on where they live or just talk to locals that this was a great success. And yet ... destroyed. It was indicative of what I had often heard about the company, that there were some brilliant engineers with some great insights, and also that there were just metric tons of business people businessing very hard and capable of driving absolutely anything into the ground because of their inability to leave well enough alone. It is a little amazing to me that all of these corporations just decided to shutter messaging and chat rooms in lockstep. And I suppose one did it, so they all had to or fall behind something or another.