Technology
As European and American markets open on Friday, oil
traders face a new era with Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO)
Messenger, the main tool used by traders to communicate since the late 1990s,
shutting down.
While the software was still operating
and actively in use during Asian hours on Friday, the company has announced it
will shut its standalone messenger software on Aug. 5.
A raft of alternatives exist, but many
oil industry users say they will dearly miss Yahoo Messenger, with even the odd
tear being shed in memory of what became a much loved tool in an otherwise
unsentimental industry.
"You have no idea how much I'll
miss Yahoo Messenger. I built up hundreds of contacts on it over more than a
decade. I have Yahoo friends I have never met, but with whom I spent many hours
bantering and joking. It also made me a lot of money. Now that it's gone, I
could cry," said a senior oil trader in Singapore who has been in the
business for 20 years.
With Yahoo Messenger's end, the oil
industry has to deal with a fragmented communication market, which some say
will force the market back to the telephone.
"Yahoo was great as an aggregator
for all commodity participants so I think any cross-broking from one messenger
platform may mean people use the old friend – the phone," said Matt
Stanley, a fuel oil broker at Freight Investor Services in Dubai.
"So in some kind of ironic way, you
may see stronger relationships formed now people have to interact the old
school way," he added.
FRAGMENTED AFTERWOLD
Yahoo, which in July announced the
sale of its core business unit to Verizon Communications Inc
(NYSE:VZ), took the oil industry by storm
in the late 1990s.
Its free, instant messaging technology
revolutionized the industry, helping usher in a new era of high-speed
communication that changed the way millions of barrels of oil traded daily.
The online, follow-up version to its
standalone messaging software cannot be used by the industry as it does not
meet compliance standards like saving conversations.
As a result, oil traders, brokers,
analysts and also journalists covering the oil industry have been scrambling
for alternatives, of which there are plenty, including Eikon Messenger, ICE
Instant Messaging, Symphony, Bloomberg Messenger, Twitter, and WhatsApp.
The inevitable fragmentation of
the market is seen as a nuisance by most: one study concluded that Eikon
Messenger had done well in the power, natural gas and
dry-bulk markets like coal or iron ore, while ICE Instant Messenger had managed
to garner much support in oil, and Symphony was heavily supported by banks.
"Let's face it, it's not the end of
the world. But Yahoo's beauty was that everybody used one platform," said
one Asian fuel broker.
"Now, we all use several platforms,
and that's a bit of a pain," he added.
Reuters News is a division of Thomson
Reuters, which operates Eikon Messenger and competes with other systems to
provide messaging services to financial markets.
Source by Reuters
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