Comments on: The Flickrization of Yahoo

By: smallerdemon

smallerdemon — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 17:11:38 +0000

Ah, well, yes, Yahoo! support is free, but I pay for my SBC DSL, and the intermixed Yahoo/SBC can often lead to support weirdness that I don’t care for. My Yahoo and SCB boxes are all combined now, which is NOT something I am happy about or ever wanted. SBC DSL customers who pay for their service also must have a very different looking My Yahoo! page than non-paying regular customers. All of the SCB/DSL stuff is now shoved to the top of the page and by SBC and Yahoo!’s own admission, can not be altered (so much for customizing you My Yahoo! page).

The rampant inclusion of the Yahoo! Toolbar creeping into unpredictable ares of download is another thing I mentioned but I feel worth mentioning again simply because that it’s only one step away from those spyware products that you agree to use when you agree to use a “free” piece of software.

I’m not trying to be necessarily anti-yahoo here, as I do remember them from WAY back and I still use it for various things, but a few of the things they have done stand out as examples of very poor consideration of their actual users that they really crept over from the “kind of ok but I can put up with this part of it” camp to the “ok, now this sucks” camp.

Community is fine, and I applaud that part of their new approach, but everything yahoo has touched that once was good somehow becomes a part of their “Oh, let’s slowly roll this product into this other one and not let anyone opt out and enjoy or develop the stand alone product anymore.” is awfully Microsoftian in nature.

By: Mr. Curious

Mr. Curious — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 01:24:04 +0000

I just thought that the pre Wired days of Man versus Technology was over. The tools of blogs + google is a combination that has revealed tons of government and corporate secrets to the people. To hear google villified as a “cold mechanistic approach” dismisses so much of what we’ve accomplished with brute force tools like google. Google equals knowledge, and blogs equal analysis. We’ve never lived in such a transparent age.

None of this should take away from Yahoo, it’s a fine set of tools. But I don’t want any thinking liberal to shy away from wonderfully powerful technology like google. We need it to see what others would love to hide.

By: Jim Fourniadis

Jim Fourniadis — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 18:30:46 +0000

Can’t complain about yahoo’s tech support, it’s free after all.

By: smallerdemon

smallerdemon — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 01:11:23 +0000

I’m stillin the Yahoo! Sucks camp myself. Their lack of any remotely proper support for their services, their nasty toolbar’s inclusion into Acrobat Reader, and their forece Yahooinization of SBC DSL customers are just a few of the missteps that all add up to avoiding yahoo as much as possible for me. Not to mention the unbelievable arrogance and tunnel vision of their engineering/programming staff in various blogs really leaves me with a unpleasant aftertaste when I look back on some of the great innovations they initialized.

I am wondering how long before they buy MySpace, since MySpace’s design is atrocious but it’s got “community” going for it. It seems like they would make a great match.

By: Inoverts v. Extroverts

Inoverts v. Extroverts — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 19:30:51 +0000

[...] And Scott Beale over at Laughing Squid just noted an interesting Business 2.0 article explaining how Yahoo has moved “toward people and community, while Google is focused on science and machines.” [...]

By: Mr. Curious

Mr. Curious — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 06:12:18 +0000

So now it’s Google bad, Yahoo good? I need to update my bumper stickers — they’re all from the Microsoft bad, Google good era. But, of course, that was half a year ago…