Late Friday afternoon, Yahoo announced that it is cutting back on features for Yahoo Messenger, the instant messaging product it has offered users since March 1998. On December 14, 2012, Yahoo will be unceremoniously removing the following features from the IM client to trim it down: Public chat rooms: I couldn’t pin down when they were introduced to Yahoo Messenger in the first place, but users will no longer have the ability to engage in conversations in public chat rooms in about two weeks. Read the full story at The Next Web.