RIP Yahoo! Messenger. Now What? The Case for ClearChat by ClearLynx

Steve Leonard, VP of Business Development, ClearLynx LLC

As first announced by Ship&Bunker last week, Yahoo's much revered legacy chat service "Yahoo! Messenger" (YM) introduced in 1998, as the trendier version of AOL Instant Messenger, will be discontinued on August 5th.

Yahoo alluded to the need for prioritizing products within Yahoo, but let's face it, it is old technology and Yahoo needs to compete with the current more stylish chat services like WhatsApp, Viber, and Snapchat to name a few of the hundreds or so available applications. One might question the timing of Yahoo's announcement given that it is in the process of auctioning off its web products and ad business partly because they may no longer be worth saving.

Writing for VentureBeat, Jordan Novet noted that YM was "...popular with users in the Asia-Pacific region, and according to Bloomberg, the old Yahoo Messenger actually still had a weirdly strong following among oil traders who used the app to bid and gossip on commodities prices. Apparently those two groups aren't enough to keep supporting such a dinosaur of an app."

So what's next for the bunker fuel business where YM has been a staple? Yahoo's new version is not an option, judging by the reaction from banks, oil traders and professionals, Yahoo's most fervent users. The glaring deficiency in archiving capabilities renders the product ineligible from a compliance standpoint. Archiving features, required by all (well, almost all) participants in the bunker business for recording deals and negotiations are also not available with popular messaging applications like WhatsApp, Viber, Voxer or Snapchat.

One known and proven option garnering considerable interest is ClearLynx®, the industry's first cloud based on-line procurement platform used by buyers and sellers to transact through the use of synchronous bid/ask dashboards. ClearLynx® offers its own ClearChat module which not only archives chats among counterparties, but records all offers made by sellers against the individual order, the value of which is actionable and becomes part of the order history.

The ClearLynx® development team has been monitoring the Yahoo situation for over a year. Indeed Yahoo's announcement was made only last week, but the decision itself dates back well over a year, demonstrated by Yahoo's complete lack of application support and maintenance. During last week's World Wide Development Conference (WWDC), the team discovered that Apple introduced a new framework to iOS developers enabling custom extensions within their built-in SMS/Messages application. ClearLynx® users who use iPhones can archive SMS texts inside the ClearLynx® mobile application right down to the inquiry and vessel specific deal transacted. Android will most likely follow suit. This provides ClearLynx® with yet another solution to capture complete transactional data.

ClearLynx® has shaped its online fuel procurement platform by addressing particular user pain points, which it believes it has solved, and in so doing made the experience easy. The bunker fuel procurement process is outdated which is precisely what offers strong incentives for companies like ClearLynx® to endlessly improve upon the existing infrastructure. We face imminent changes in how buyers and sellers communicate, transact, comply and report.

Being at the forefront of this effort, ClearLynx® is fashioning new ways to make the fuel sales process seamless by providing the industry with solutions. This is the basic lesson in product development. Contact ClearLynx® for a demonstration on a new way of purchasing bunkers in an efficient, compliant and secure environment.