Yahoo!icide

Yahoo! is continuing their never ending quest to render themselves obsolete.

For reasons unexplainable by me they continue operating with the philosophy "Less is More." Services and features continue to be cut back or eliminated altogether, usually leaving their users with no choice but to go somewhere else altogether. They seem to be intentionally weakening their own customer base while simultaneously strenghtening that of their competition.
 

Y! Games are ancient and have undergone no significant changes in play or appearance for over a decade. Meanwhile, game sites like Pogo are on a level so far above Yahoo! that the big red Y! will probably never catch up and never measure up.

Y! Photos was discontinued, leaving users with two poor choices. Users could either switch to Flickr, an unbranded (but Yahoo! owned) service which was more difficult to use and offered considerably less than what they were used to unless they paid for a premium account, or they could switch to another service not affiliated with Yahoo! at all. Bye-bye users.

The Y! Briefcase service was discontinued and no replacement offered. Users now have to go elsewhere for any photo or document storage. Bye-bye users

LAUNCHcast radio underwent major change, removing the ability to create or maintain custom stations which play music defined by the listener's specific preferences. Bye-bye users

Yahoo! 360° will soon be put out of its misery after years of neglect during which it never functioned properly. No replacement is offered. This completely removes Y! from the social networking market, one of the biggest markets on the internet. I can't even begin to fathom the reasoning behind this decision.

The new "universal profile" is a bug laden disaster almost as unusable as 360° often was. A large percentage of users aren't even able to access their own profile to make changes, so it broadcasts updates about all of their activities on Yahoo! to all of their contacts without their permission or control. The developers of this new profile are themselves unsure of what purpose it is supposed to serve, they continue to add features and functionality which make it usable as a stripped down social networking site while all the while claiming it's not supposed to be. Bye-bye users

GeoCities is the next to be shut down. Users who have had personal websites hosted on GeoCities for a decade or more will now have to go elsewhere. Yahoo! will have no free website hosting features anymore. Bye-bye users

Yahoo! Answers is a disaster. It could have been a worthwhile property but due to incompetence, lack of foresight and lack of any sort of user control it has turned into a giant game, a pre-teen Dear Abby and rate my pic site, a cesspool of hatred and a haven for spammers and malware distributors. Yet Yahoo! still has no restrictions in place to prevent ill intentioned users from sitting down at their computer and creating dozens upon dozens of back to back accounts which they then use to blanket the site with spam and malware. Malware alone has continued unabated for over a year, with the only control in place being the herculean search and report efforts of many of it's users. Even then Y! refuses to give them the tools they need to do the job properly, and keeps breaking the one ineffective tool they do have.

Then there's Yahoo!'s crown jewel, their "Customer Care" division. I doubt there has ever been a more incompetent, ineffectual, self-defeating customer care department than the poor excuse offered by Yahoo!. Instead of working to keep their users, they continually cause them to leave by way of horrible service and attitude. Contacting them about anything only begins a chain of copy and paste responses, most of which don't even address any point made in the original contact. They may as well just respond to the first inquiry with a simple "Fuck you, we don't care." At least then the user gets the idea the first time instead of dealing with the frustration and aggravation of multiple communications over an extended period of time while their issue remains unresolved. On Yahoo! it is totally possible to lose your entire account and everything in it for no reason at all without ever being given a reason, especially if you participate in Y! Answers.

Personally I think Yahoo! totally blew it by not selling to Microsoft. They have cut back their staff and services to the point where none of their new products work and nobody there can fix them. I honestly see no reason to even use Yahoo! for anything now aside from Messenger and for some, e-mail. I won't use Y! Mail myself for the simple reason that I could lose it at any time due to unexplained account deactivation. The one service I still use is Messenger, because it's free. I will not pay them again for the use of the Phone Out service because the last time I did they stole the remaining prepaid balance when they erroneously deactivated my account. When they realized their mistake and reactivated it the balance was gone and they refuse to reinstate it. So, screw 'em. So what do you think, will Yahoo! survive and regain it's former status or will they continue to decline to the point where they are irrelevant?

Yahoo 360° Closing

Yahoo! has announced that they are closing down 360° early next year. They aim to make a universal profile to replace all the different ones currently used. Yahoo! claims that none of your content like contacts and blogs will be deleted but it is Yahoo! we're talking about here.

So now it's time to find a substitute, either as a backup plan or on a more permanent basis if you're fed up with Yahoo! and their inability to consistently offer services and/or make them work correctly. The three I hear the most are MySpace, Facebook and Multiply.

MySpace is kind of a pain in the ass. It generally seems to take multiple clicks to get anywhere or find anything. They've made it easier to customize your pages but overall it's still not all that easy to control how your page looks. Most customization requires you getting code from a non-MySpace site and pasting it in. Blog privacy options are good, each entry can be set individually unlike 360°. You can make photo albums and all that, but it's nothing special. I have a MySpace page but I never use it.

Multiply is much better in my opinion. Customizing is easier, there are several premade themes you can pick from and user groups onsite with thousands more. You can easily hide and restore content modules on your page or drag and drop to rearrange them. There are multiple privacy levels ranging from specific users all the way up to everyone. Blog entry sharing options can be set individually per entry. What I like most is that everything is easy to find, when you log in you are taken to a page that shows you updates from all of your contacts, or if you choose it can show just yours, or those from contacts of your contacts, etc... You also have control over how these are displayed to you. One huge plus is that Multiply has a couple of Import tools for 360°. One enables you to import your blog entries with almost no effort. You lose the comments but your blog entry is preserved, html and all. Another tool enables you to invite any or all of your 360° contacts to Multiply in a couple quick easy steps. Overall I much prefer the look and feel of Multiply.

Boooo Flickr!

   I'm already sick of Flickr, my introductory free PRO account is about to expire and when it does I'm only allowed to have 3 sets (albums). All the photos remain but the ability to organize them goes away. It seems pretty stupid to make people look through a couple of hundred photos to find ones they may be interested in seeing. 

Flickr doesn't allow you to reorganize the Photostream either so you're stuck with showing that in the order that the pictures were downloaded unless you manually edit the upload date of every photo one at a time. You can't even put a slideshow of your Flickr photos on a blog, they don't offer any such option. Screw Yahoo! for shutting down their own Photos service and leaving us with this as the alternative, the hunt is on for a new photo sharing site.

MyPhotoAlbum.com was my first try. Joining was easy, and figuring things out seemed easier than in Flickr. Drawbacks are that free accounts can't show the full sized originals, have limited ability to post slide shows in blogs and the code they provide does not function in Yahoo! 360° (then again, what does?). It does work in MySpace just fine though.

Does anyone out there know of any good free photo storage/sharing sites without these limitations?

Yahoo! Photos Closing Down

Yahpoo! recently spend a considerable amount of time and money revamping their rather old Yahpoo! Photos service. Of course, being Yahpoo! it's chock freaking full of bugs and rarely if ever works right, not to mention the fact that it totally screwed up a lot of Photo Sharing on 360º pages everywhere. When it did work properly it was great, I thought it was far and away the best photo sharing option on the internet, easy to use and very intuitive.

Now the Yahpoo! powers that be have decided that they will completely do away with this new Y! Photos and the whole Y! Photos service! Some time this fall they will be taking it offline. During the summer you'll be getting an e-mail from them explaining your options.

Anyway, I've started the slow and painful process of migrating my photos over to Flickr so I can start learning how it works. Sign up is easy, all I needed was my Y! ID. If you have a Flickr account, let me know so I can add you as a contact. Or, here's my Flickr, you can add me as a contact from there by hovering your cursor on my Buddy Icon.

Update: Since posting this entry I've since discontinued all use of any Yahoo! services.

Hating on Yahoo!

I'd like to take this opportunity to loudly declare my firm belief that YAHOO! SUCKS!. Lately it seems that every part of their services have been screwed up. As usual, if you do manage to get a response from an actual person at Yahpoo! Customer Care they just tell you that they were unable to replicate the problem then try to pass it off as a problem with your computer.

360° is screwy, html blog entries require repeated and extensive re-editing before they post correctly and the Share Photos feature seems to be broken too. I got so fed up that I made a myspace page and copied most of my blogs to it.

Y! Photos is all buggered up too. It seems they've updated the whole interface and given it some new features. Nice! Too bad most of it doesn't work.

Yahoo! Message Boards are screwed up, "technical difficulty" error messages out the wazoo. Sometimes they open, sometimes they don't. Sometimes when they open correctly they even remember your settings! Wow ... progress!

Then we get to Yahoo! Answers. It used to be fun helping people out but now the site is now full of assholes, idiots, spammers, homophobes, racists and any other low-life form of bigoted horse's ass you can imagine so I quit going there. Now I have to find something else to do, again. Viva la Yahpoo!!