I'll miss all your shortcomings, your badly masked button graphics, your occasionally successful file transfers, and, yes, your awful frame rate video. I mean, how hard would it be to wrap the web interface into a shell? AIM does that with their videoconferencing - it's a Flash application.

I wonder why Yahoo seems to have just given up on this. Was this Apple or was it Yahoo? I mean, everything worked fine until I updated to Yosemite, and then suddenly the application has a 'NO' through it, like it's a 68K application or something. It was one of the last holdouts from the era where you could just turn your webcam on, and friends might actually ask to watch it, rather than just trying to creep on your Stickam stream. I could have a voice conversation with my mom - who had Y!M logged in all the time for her work - or talk to some old friends that would pop into their rarely used Yahoo accounts every so often. It still clung to its 3 frame-per-second webcam roots and sometimes-working-audio, but - like an old girlfriend who's lap you pass out drunk and crying on - it was familiar. When PowerPC gave way to Intel, and full 30fps videoconferencing was offered by everyone - iChat, Skype, Gizmo, and even eventually MSN Messenger - I still hung onto the newly relaunched beta of Yahoo! Messenger. In the unfamiliar new world of OSX, Yahoo was a friendly face across a crowd, smiling while it introduced me to all the new people on the block. Yahoo stayed the same (it was a Carbon application at that point, so the OS9 version WAS the OSX version), and I kept using it. Then OSX came along, and iChat gave us all AIM-based videoconferencing. The very shortcomings of the application were part of what endeared it. It felt like a rubber band airplane that I'd built out of balsa wood in my basement, and which fell apart violently every second time I'd try to make it fly. I liked how light it felt in OS9, how little memory it took up and even how poorly its buttons were animated. So I used the application, and over time I became fond of it. In 2001, NO chat software for the Mac had any webcam support.

Sure, I had AIM - everyone used AIM - but my girlfriend had Windows and a webcam. I remember back in the early 2000s, when I was still using a G3 under OS 8.6, and Yahoo Messenger was my go-to messenger.

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