Yahoo announced that it is cutting down on some of the Yahoo Messenger features such as public chat rooms, Windows Live Messenger support, Pingbox on december 14 and will not be offering Yahoo! Voice Phone In and Phone Out services by January 30th, 2013.
Public chat rooms which were topic-based or region-based will stop functioning from December 14. “In order to focus on providing great new features for Yahoo! Messenger, we are discontinuing some Messenger services, including our public chat rooms on December 14. We know that some long-term Yahoo! Messenger users still enjoy these topic-based communities, however we feel that by embracing the modern technologies and platforms available today, Yahoo! will uncover better ways to foster meaningful communities and connections with the people you care about,” said Yahoo on its Messenger help page.
Pingbox is a feature that let users interact privately with visitors on their social networks, blogs, etc., using the users Yahoo Messenger profile. This service will get the axe as well on December 14. Users using the service can uninstall it using these steps.
Discontinuing WIndows Live Messenger support was somewhat expected after Microsoft announced that it is planning to retire the Live Messenger service and integrate it will Skype. The MIcrosoft contacts on your Yahoo Messenger profile will still appear, although they will be greyed out and any messages sent will not be delivered.
“We have decided to discontinue several Yahoo! product features. This will enable us to refocus our efforts on modernizing our core Yahoo! products experiences and of course, create new ones,” said the Yahoo blog post on Friday.
Source: Yahoo Messenger Blog