In 1998 Yahoo! Clubs was launched as an extension of services developed by
Yahoo! Messenger. In August 2000 Yahoo acquired
eGroups.com. Yahoo! Groups was launched in early 2001 as an integration of technology from eGroups.com and community groups from both eGroups.com and Yahoo! Clubs. In 2001 Yahoo! deleted adult groups from its search directory, making it very difficult to locate Yahoo! groups with adult content. The
Groups Updates Email feature was introduced in 2010. It summarized, in a single email, all the updates that occurred every twenty-four hours in all groups. In September 2010, a major facelift was rolled out, making Yahoo! Groups look very similar to Facebook. In December, Yahoo! Groups Japan emailed its users and posted a notice on its homepage, to announce that its service, which commenced in February 2004, would be closing on May 28, 2014. In October 2019, Yahoo! announced that all content that had been posted to Yahoo! Groups will be deleted on December 14, 2019; Once the content was deleted, users of Yahoo! Groups were only able to browse the group directory, request invitations and, if members of a group, send messages to that group. On October 13, 2020, Yahoo! announced they would be shutting down Yahoo! Groups on December 15, 2020. This message stopped appearing at the end of January 2021 and the Yahoo! Groups web address began redirecting to the main Yahoo! page.
Criticism and controversy On August 31, 2010, Yahoo! Groups started rolling out a major software change, which was denounced by a large number of users. The re-model was completely abandoned on January 12, 2011. ==Site statistics==