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2001 - 2020
Yahoo! Groups
“This message was sent to the group.”
- Birth year
- 2001
- Shutdown year
- 2020
- Lifespan
- 19 years
- Peak era
- 2001-2010
- Company
- Yahoo!
- Category
- Websites
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What Was It?
Yahoo! Groups was where the internet's clubs lived before social networks: fan fiction circles, school reunions, knitting patterns, band mailing lists and local parents' groups, each with its own message archive, shared files and photos.
Launched under the Yahoo! name in January 2001, it became one of the largest collections of online discussion boards in the world. A group could be a lively forum, a quiet announcement list or a daily digest email that arrived every morning for years.
Yahoo! stripped the website back to bare mailing lists in February 2020 and shut the service down completely on December 15, 2020. Volunteer archivists rushed to save what they could of nearly two decades of conversations.
Things You Probably Forgot
- The daily digest email with forty messages in it
- Files sections full of fan fiction and Word documents
- Waiting for a moderator to approve your membership
- Group calendars nobody updated
- Replying to the whole list by accident
The Story
- 2001 Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Groups, building on its acquisition of eGroups.
- 2009 Groups remained one of the largest collections of discussion boards online.
- 2020 Web features were removed in February and the service closed on December 15.
How It Died
Yahoo! removed online access to group discussions and files in February 2020 and closed Yahoo! Groups entirely on December 15, 2020.
What Replaced It?
Memories
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