The Decline And Fall Of Yahoo!

My Top 3

Long-time readers of this blog will recall that we’ve had issues with Yahoo! in the past. We love Yahoo! Messenger so much that we rarely use any other instant messaging client, but we haven’t been too happy with most of their other features. To bring you up to speed, here is the chronology of our previous run-ins with the company, and this list doesn’t even include the loss of our Yahoo! 360° page and Yahoo!’s decision to remove adult groups from their searches:

Lost two IDs and hosting accounts
Lost our 4100-member group and three more IDs
Lost another ID and ownership of our groups
Lost two more IDs and another group
Lost three more groups, including one with 3000+ members

Now, Yahoo! has made the decision to overhaul member profiles. Even though the new profiles are still in beta status, all members were forced to use them a couple of weeks ago. We are still trying to figure our how our new profile is supposed to work, but the first thing we discovered is that we’ve lost the option to post our home page and our favorite links. Furthermore, Yahoo! has removed the option to create separate profiles for different aliases under the same account, so our family and vanilla friends (what few we have)can no longer see the profile for our vanilla alias.

This situation screws with the way we run our Yahoo! Groups. In order to determine the age and authenticity of those who apply for membership in our groups, we prefer that all profiles be completely filled out. Unfortunately, with most of the new profiles now either blank or inaccessible to us, there isn’t much point in checking them anymore. Sheryl is still reviewing profiles for the Queen of Spades Tattoos group, but our Interracial Fantasies in Colorado and Mile High Cream Pie groups now have open memberships.

We can’t help but wonder if this is a desperate effort to save a failing company. While we are happy the company is not selling itself to the Evil Empire (yet), Yahoo! has been losing a lot of money in recent quarters, and it just got through announcing the upcoming layoffs of 1500 workers. If this is the best it can do, Yahoo! is doomed.

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