Yahoo Buys Blink And Will Shut It Down In The Next Few Weeks

Yahoo has acquired Blink, a self destructing messaging service (also known as ephemeral messaging) and the team behind Blink will join Yahoo. Blink will be shut down in the next few weeks as a result of the acquisition.

Blink is a messaging service just like Snapchat where users can share text messages, photos, videos, voice messages and much more with either other individuals or even groups. The messages will self destruct or disappear after the user has viewed the message - the user can set the time after which the messages would disappear.

Blink launched the iOS app in April 2013 and the Android app was only launched February this year. The Android app has had 10,000-50,000 installs so far, according to the stats in Google Play Store.

Blink is much like Snapchat, and Snapchat is even more popular than Blink - which makes us think it would have been better if Yahoo had bought Snapchat! However we know Snapchat is not very much “interested” in getting sold for a short term gain as the company turned down the $3 billion offer from Facebook earlier.

Yahoo has bought lots of tech companies last year and is continuing the same this year too - and Yahoo is shutting down most of the properties it bought.

Facebook recently discontinued Poke, a similar ephemeral messaging app. And given that Yahoo will be shutting down Blink shortly, Snapchat could gain more new users!

Yahoo has not revealed about any of its future plans about Blink or whether it will launch a replacement app. The blog post at Blink just says “We hope you stick with us through the next chapter” although we don’t know what “next chapter” means.

As of now, the team behind Blink who were with Meh Labs (the former company behind Blink) will join Yahoo. This naturally means Yahoo is more interested in the hands and brain behind the app rather than the app itself; the team will work on Yahoo’s “smart communication products”.

Let’s see what Yahoo comes up with next!