I couldn't care less about Yahoo

13 September, 2005

From the comment by Jake Tracey on Flickr signup: From human to droid in a Yahoo moment?.

What Yahoo! doesn’t understand is that no one wants to join them anymore.

Do people still fill in massive sign-up forms like the Yahoo! one on display at the 37signals post? Jesus, why? I can’t think of a single compelling offering from Yahoo. Not only is their website ludicrously hard to navigate, but I’ve only ever met two people who use Yahoo Messenger. Don’t get me started on their “personal” offerings like Yahoo 360. Christ that’s terrible.

Nothing that Yahoo provides is enjoyable, and that, I think is the real kicker.

See other posts tagged with general and all posts made in September 2005.

Comments

alf

13 September, 2005 at 17:12

Yahoo’s cinema listings are good, and the MyYahoo dashboard-style personalised portal (with TV listings) is quite nice too. I have a feeling I’ll be using Yahoo for location-based services, that’s why I went to the trouble of creating an account.

raster

13 September, 2005 at 21:40

While Google has search (and has it good) Yahoo! really does offer a *ton* of things for the average web user (and some stuff for the above average web user.) Yahoo! has so much sometimes it’s hard to remember it all: Search, Groups, Maps, News, Local, Personals, Stores… I think where they lack in quality they try to make uo for it in quantity.

Still, we need Yahoo! if for nothing more than to be competition to Google.

I must have joined Yahoo! back in the late-1990’s when the sign-up form was not quite as daunting…

Pip

14 September, 2005 at 09:22

“I must have joined Yahoo! back in the late-1990’s when the sign-up form was not quite as daunting…”

Yes, same here.

Interestingly, I only discovered Yahoo’s cinema listings a few weeks ago, and alf’s right, they’re very good (better with the GM script that turns addresses into links to Google maps).

I haven’t seen the TV listings, I’ll have to have a look at those.

Quantity over quality; yes, that sounds like Yahoo to me.

Ben Ward

14 September, 2005 at 18:47

I’m indifferent towards Yahoo as a company, I’m not a fan of portals but their recent acquisitions have been sound – ‘Googlish’ even.

I think they lost their way, but like all companies in the search space, they’ve learned from Google and may well be on the way back up.