Yahoo launches Together, formerly Squirrel in beta, a group messaging app that lets groups organize chats by topics
Farewell, Yahoo Messenger. Hello, Yahoo Together? Yep, Yahoo is returning to the messaging space today after closing its older app due to lack of use.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second act of a quiet experiment: Yahoo released Squirrel as an invite-only group chat app back in May, letting conversations split into topic-specific rooms, and has now promoted it to a public beta under the name Together. The timing matters because Yahoo shut down Messenger on July 17, ending a client that dated to Yahoo Pager in 1998.
It is also a familiar loop for the company: the 2015 Messenger revamp added group messaging, unsend, likes, and GIFs but did not save the product, and an earlier plan to build a video-plus-text messenger was reported that same year. Together is Yahoo's attempt to restart in messaging with a smaller, focused surface rather than a flagship relaunch.
First-order effects
- Former Messenger users who lost their chat home in July now have a Yahoo-branded destination again, one built around organizing group conversations by topics instead of one flat thread.
- Squirrel's small invite-only base becomes the seed population of a public beta, shifting the product from private test to open evaluation.
Second-order effects
- Together enters group messaging against entrenched incumbents with no installed-base advantage, so Yahoo must win groups on the topic-room structure itself rather than on network effects it no longer has.
- A visible failure here would be Yahoo's third messaging exit in the arc from the 2015 revamp through Messenger's shutdown, raising the bar for any future consumer-app investment from the company.
Third-order effects
- If the Squirrel-to-Together path works, it points to a structural playbook for legacy portals: incubate small experimental apps quietly, kill the aging flagship, and promote only what shows organic pull — accepting repeated shutdowns as the cost of finding a hit.
- Topic-structured group chat as a differentiator tests whether users will organize around subjects inside one app, or whether flat-thread networks remain locked in by habit and contacts.
The trend: Legacy web brands are returning to messaging not by reviving their old clients but by incubating small experimental apps and promoting the ones that stick.