The one time king of the search engines, Yahoo, announced today the official shutdown of its platform’s groups on October 21, 2019. The news does not come as much of a surprise to existing users with Yahoo e-mail accounts and/or group memberships. Since the acquisition of the brand by Verizon Communications in 2016, the telecommunications giant spearheaded the move to revamp and revitalize Yahoo’s online services. This includes Yahoo Groups – which for a long time – served as vital entities for both social and business engagements.
According to the announcement, all Yahoo Groups content will be removed by December 14, 2019. Existing users will no longer be able to upload new content to groups but their pages will remain on the network. This move follows the closure of Google+ back in April of this year due to security and data breaches. Google also cited the dominance of new social networks as another reason for its discontinued support of the service.
This cements the fact that older search engines and social media outlets can no longer compete with the big-hitters. With Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram continuing to grow by leaps and bounds, legacy platforms are on their way out. While Yahoo does remain a competitor in the search-engine realm, Google continues to sit atop the social media totem pole. The domination of Google and Amazon (for global marketplace shoppers) has even led to worldwide businesses refiguring their presence across multiple online networks.
Which content will be removed from Yahoo Groups?
Yahoo is planning on removing the following content from Yahoo Groups on December 14, 2019:
- Attachments
- Calendar
- Conversations
- Database
- Email Updates
- Files
- Folders
- Links
- Message Digest
- Message History
- Photos
- Polls
If you have a business or brand group on Yahoo Groups, now is the time to save all your content before it’s removed. Simply sign in to your Yahoo account and download the files from the group’s page. Like the Google+ content acquisition, you will have to request Yahoo to send you the data. Once the content has been gathered and saved, Yahoo will send you a link via e-mail.
Can people still join existing Yahoo Groups?
Moving forward, Yahoo Groups will be harder to join for the general public at large. Any currently public groups will become private or restricted. While they will still have a place in the search results, users will have to submit requests to join these groups.
Today’s announcement of the closing of Yahoo Groups was done somewhat quietly. While the news has spread like wildfire across the web, Yahoo only mentioned the closure in a support document to its platform’s users. The service will only exist in minimal capacity after December 14th. Similarly, administrators will have limited access to page tools and features.
While the closing has puzzled some users, many have already migrated to other social networks with wider reaches for content distribution. Still, there are others – like Jason Scott of the Internet Archive – that have vowed to preserve as much content from the Groups as possible. With Yahoo collaborating with other providers like Google for shared ad revenue, is there a chance that it might revive Groups for brand owners in the near or distant future? Only time will tell.