Messenger (sometimes abbreviated Y!M) was an instant messaging client and associated protocol created and formerly operated by Yahoo!.

Pager launched on March 9, 1998, an instant messaging (IM) client integrated with Yahoo!

[8] Version 5.0, released November 2001, introduced IMVironments, an initiative that allowed users to play music and Flash Video clips inside the IM window.

partnered with rock band Garbage that provided their single "Androgyny" available to share by users.

[11] Other partnerships also made IMVironments for the movie Monsters, Inc., the video game Super Smash Bros. Melee, and the character Hello Kitty, among others.

offered for corporate subscribers a more secure and better (SSL) encrypted IM client, called Yahoo!

Messenger, culminating in the Gmail-like web archival and indexing of chat conversations through Yahoo!

It exploited the new design elements of Vista's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and introduced a new user interface and features.

[30][31][32] This version also saw the release of Pingbox, which embeds on a blog or website and allows visitors to send IM texts anonymously without needing Yahoo!

[33] Version 10, released November 2009, incorporates many bug fixes and features high-quality video calling.

It allowed users to create public chat rooms, send private messages, and use emoticons.

Chat events eventually developed broadcast partnerships with 100+ entities and hosted 350+ events-a-month.

In June 2005, with no advance warning, Yahoo disabled users' ability to create their own chat rooms.

The move came after KPRC-TV in Houston, Texas, reported that many of the user-created rooms were geared toward pedophilia.

The story prompted several advertisers, including Pepsi and Georgia-Pacific, to pull their ads from Yahoo.

[61] On November 30, 2012, Yahoo announced that among other changes that the public chat rooms would be discontinued as of December 14, 2012.

The company worked for a while on a way to allow users to create their own rooms while providing safeguards against abuse[citation needed].

Messenger featured the ability for users to create plug-ins, which are then hosted and showcased on the Yahoo chat room.

Messenger users could listen to free and paid Internet radio services, using the defunct Yahoo!

Unlike HTTP, however, YMSG was a proprietary protocol, a closed standard aligned only with the Yahoo!

Rival messaging services have their own protocols, some based on open standards, others proprietary, each effectively fulfilling the same role with different mechanics.

Messenger Protocol into some web browsers, so that URIs beginning ymsgr could open a new Yahoo!

This is similar in function to the mailto URI scheme, which creates a new e-mail message using the system's default mail program.

For instance, a web page might include a link like the following in its HTML source to open a window for sending a message to the YIM user exampleuser: Send Message To specify a message body, the m parameter was used, so that the link location might look like this: ymsgr:sendim?exampleuser&m=This+is+my+message Other commands were: On October 13, 2005, Yahoo and Microsoft announced plans to introduce interoperability between their two messengers, creating the second-largest real-time communications service userbase worldwide: 40 percent of all users.

[67][68] The announcement came after years of third-party interoperability success (most notably, Trillian and Pidgin) and criticisms that the major real-time communications services were locking their networks.

This allowed Yahoo and Windows Live Messenger users to chat to each other without the need to create an account on the other service, provided both contacts used the latest versions of the clients.

Third-party clients that could access the original service included: As of August 2000, according to Media Metrix, Yahoo!

[69] As of the month of September 2001, over five billion instant messages were sent on the network, up 115% from the year before, according to Media Metrix.

[77][78] Yahoo's primary solution to the issue involved deleting such messages and placing the senders on an Ignore List.

[82][83] The British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)'s secret mass surveillance program Optic Nerve and National Security Agency (NSA) were reported to be indiscriminately collecting still images from Yahoo webcam streams from millions of mostly innocent Yahoo webcam users from 2008 to 2010, among other things creating a database for facial recognition for future use.