Yahoo.. curious

Hey everyone,

I was just given a link to yahoo and I have not thought about them in ages. Couple years at least. I remember I used to use them all the time. I had my rocketmail, geocities, chat, email and my news all setup perfectly. At some point I was bouncing between yahoo and google. Google for search, yahoo for services. More and more they started intermixing ads in with their news and trying to disguise it as news. And it was kind the last straw for me, so I went and switched my services to google.

Just curious, what made you (assuming you ever did use it) walk away from Yahoo?

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Comments

dynamik

What's Yahoo?

Devilsbane

I use it all.

MSN/Hotmail, Google, Yahoo, AOL

varelg

I haven't walked away from yahoo... yet. I had for a time my private hotmail and yahoo addresses in parallel but then hotmail service was a real mess, unpredictable, unavailable at times, tons of spam you couldn't filter etc. so I stayed with yahoo.
My impression is, the amount of news-vertisments online just reflects how bad it is off- line, with the rest of the media. TV just keeps getting worse, it isn't enough anymore that the original programming is just a pause between two waves of commercials now even the original programming is a commercial itself. Every TV station/channel now airs brain **** of varying amount. Of course the cancer will spread to online media, it seems there's no escape.
Also, yahoo, google, hotmail/MSN, they are all into social networking now, so results are obvious. Social media is a heaven for advertisers. It's their wonderfull new playground with lots of guinea pigs to experiment on.
Tell me one worthy online news resource without product placement and other forms of ad assault.

Devilsbane

You have to watch a 30 second ad to see a 2 minute clip. And you better not miss any of it, because if you want to watch it again then you're gonna have to sit through the same ad again lol

kevozz

Yea, Yahoo! has lost their edge and delved into suckage. Until recently, i was getting better results from Ask.com

The adds that take over the whole screen enrage me (intrusive advertising i'm guessing). I stopped using Yahoo! and most of their services due to those ads and i give them an earful every time one pops up. Which i'm surprised they haven't banned me.

Advertising doesn't do much good when it drives away your customer.

As Devilsbane mentioned, having to watch advertising for every single video.

Delays when delivering attachments much over a few megs. I love when an email shows up 3 days later...

Having my password changed 3 times in one day and couldn't get their assistance (hacked i guess). Finally changed everything.

Oh and the best: I occasionally email myself from the same address and there is only one recipient (me). I do this occasionally, maybe once every few weeks. Well they decide to ban me from sending emails for 3 days on 4 different occasions. Way to save the internets Yahoo!!!

wd40

I still use Yahoo! for every thing.

I hate how google and bing switch to my native language automatically

.

And I actually enjoy the bits of news and other articles that I get on Yahoo's main page.

I hate hotmail's cluttered mail box + I have no idea why Gmail takes a long time to load the simple main page on a slow connection.

tiersten

wd40 wrote: »

I hate how google and bing switch to my native language automatically .

How is that a bad thing? You can just bookmark the generic US site anyway.

wd40 wrote: »

I have no idea why Gmail takes a long time to load the simple main page on a slow connection.

Use the basic HTML Gmail view if you're on a slow connection. The regular view may look simple but there is a lot going on behind the scenes with AJAX.

wd40

tiersten wrote: »

How is that a bad thing? You can just bookmark the generic US site anyway.

Use the basic HTML Gmail view if you're on a slow connection. The regular view may look simple but there is a lot going on behind the scenes with AJAX.

My native language is read from right to left, reading English from right to left is annoying, screen shot attached, and I can not bookmark the US page, it redirects me to the local site.

Why use the basic GMail version if the full Yahoo! version loads faster

google.jpg

Plantwiz

Never used y@h00 on purpose.

Thought it was pretty lame, and before google, I used AskJeeves and FTP, but earlier it was GOPHER and BBS days...

Perhaps if it had a better name, but every time I hear it I think Yoohoo.

tiersten

wd40 wrote: »

My native language is read from right to left, reading English from right to left is annoying, screen shot attached, and I can not bookmark the US page, it redirects me to the local site.

Ahh. Go to Google and you can bookmark that. If you don't add anything to the end of the URL then it will do the country autodetection.

wd40 wrote: »

Why use the basic GMail version if the full Yahoo! version loads faster

True. I use Gmail because of the free POP3/IMAP and Android integration.

stuh84

Never liked Yahoo anyway, so I never moved from it, because I was never with it.

cnfuzzd

yahoo... serious

Devilsbane

I actually use yahoo as my home page. It is a capable search engine and I enjoy taking a peek at the headlines. I do have an email address/chat account but I rarely use it.

xenodamus

My wife has used a yahoo email address for years and she finally decided to start using Outlook this weekend. So, I try to set up her Yahoo as POP3 and it turns out you can only POP Yahoo if you upgrade to Mail Plus for $19.99/year....wth?!??

Looked like there were some free programs out there to proxy between Outlook and Yahoo, but it really shouldn't be that much trouble. I never used them anyway, but definitely won't after finding that out.

ssampier

I still use Yahoo. I enjoy reading Yahoo news and comics. Also I still have my yahoo email address; same one from 1996.

I think Yahoo has some good properties, flickr, del.icio.us, etc, but doesn't know how to tie them together and make them one.

Yahoo search hasn't been good for years. I use Google for search. I have mixed opinions of other Google services; some are great (Google Mail/Gmail), some are not so great (Postini really needs an interface update).

tiersten

ssampier wrote: »

some are not so great (Postini really needs an interface update).

I wouldn't be surprised if Google acquired Postini for the filtering technology and not the service itself. Postini isn't really advertised that well unlike the other Google hosting services.

Devilsbane

xenodamus wrote: »

My wife has used a yahoo email address for years and she finally decided to start using Outlook this weekend. So, I try to set up her Yahoo as POP3 and it turns out you can only POP Yahoo if you upgrade to Mail Plus for $19.99/year....wth?!??

Looked like there were some free programs out there to proxy between Outlook and Yahoo, but it really shouldn't be that much trouble. I never used them anyway, but definitely won't after finding that out.

Use IMAP. I use it on my phone and it works great. Better than POP3 anyway.

My phone set it up automatically.
Incoming server: palm.imap.mail.yahoo.com
port 143
Outgoing server: palm.smtp.mail.yahoo.com
port 25

Apparently it doesn't use encryption though, at least not the default settings. I never use it anyway so I guess it isn't a big deal.

Devilsbane

ssampier wrote: »

Yahoo search hasn't been good for years. I use Google for search. I have mixed opinions of other Google services; some are great (Google Mail/Gmail), some are not so great (Postini really needs an interface update).

I user yahoo search all the time. I don't really see a difference between it and google. Things pop up in a different order, but I always find what I'm looking for. For a long time it was powered by google. Now I believe yahoo is in it with Microsoft and it is powered by Bing.

chmorin

Yahoo is fail at everything but some news. I have to pay to have yahoo forward to my mail client? What a load of bull.

tiersten

chmorin wrote: »

Yahoo is fail at everything but some news. I have to pay to have yahoo forward to my mail client? What a load of bull.

That has nearly always been a paid feature if it was a supported feature. It changed when Gmail came along with it as a supported free feature. If you don't like that policy then you'll just have to move. Not like you're paying for this service :P

chmorin

tiersten wrote: »

That has nearly always been a paid feature if it was a supported feature. It changed when Gmail came along with it as a supported free feature. If you don't like that policy then you'll just have to move. Not like you're paying for this service :P

Hence why I don't use yahoo. AOL provided it as a free feature as well. That seems to set the standard pretty low if yahoo can't provide what AOL can. (Considering AOL likes to copy yahoo...)

tiersten

chmorin wrote: »

Hence why I don't use yahoo. AOL provided it as a free feature as well. That seems to set the standard pretty low if yahoo can't provide what AOL can. (Considering AOL likes to copy yahoo...)

You can get free webmail from AOL without being a customer? Who actually willingly goes to AOL to get an address o.O

Gmail shook things up in the free webmail world with the free supported POP3/IMAP and large amount of storage space. Before them, you'd be lucky to get more than 20MB.

ssampier

tiersten wrote: »

I wouldn't be surprised if Google acquired Postini for the filtering technology and not the service itself. Postini isn't really advertised that well unlike the other Google hosting services.

You're probably right. That didn't stop Google from trying to sell me a Google Postini package with a $700 setup fee. If you work for a corporation $700 is nothing. For our small org $700 was a lot of money. We went with a very nice reseller in Tennessee.

The interface baffled them sometimes, too.

varelg

tiersten wrote: »

You can get free webmail from AOL without being a customer? Who actually willingly goes to AOL to get an address o.O

Gmail shook things up in the free webmail world with the free supported POP3/IMAP and large amount of storage space. Before them, you'd be lucky to get more than 20MB.

True, you would open an account there only if you are a customer, which I had when I was a customer back in the era of dial-up. AOL is the original leader in the amount of news- vertising and ad assaults. Its client never went away despite all my uninstallation efforts on my old computer. The scariest AOL episode though happened to one of my neighbours: during a customer service call, it was accidentally revealed that AOL monitored all her web activity, web sites visited, messages over AOL messenger etc. AOL no more. Looking back, even today's Yahoo advertising practices look like a picnic compared to what AOL used to do.
Yahoo actually shook things up first when they came up with unlimited storage while everybody else had limits. That was even before GMail came to be.
Haven't checked my gmail account in ages. It's just scary how instantly a connection is made between gmail account info and YouTube.

chmorin

tiersten wrote: »

You can get free webmail from AOL without being a customer? Who actually willingly goes to AOL to get an address o.O

When you can skip AOL's webmail and use your own client? Why wouldn't you back in the day when it was that, yahoo, and no invite to gmail.

tiersten

chmorin wrote: »

When you can skip AOL's webmail and use your own client? Why wouldn't you back in the day when it was that, yahoo, and no invite to gmail.

Everybody I know just used to use hotmail. You used to be able to get Outlook integration for free.

chrisone

I use and read yahoo everyday. I like the "my home page" features. I get to edit it with the news i want to read in little notes/widgets when i pop open my home page. I am sure google does the same, but yahoo does everything i want already and my email i do not wish to change it. I keep my needs simple (search engine/email/some news), yahoo has been there for more than 10years supplying my needs, i just use google as a secondary source search engine. I enjoy visiting CNN.com for my news articles. Other than that i dont see why yahoo can't co-exist with google.

Maybe someday Jobs will introduce iSearch website to compete with google and microsoft lol

tiersten

chrisone wrote: »

Maybe someday Jobs will introduce iSearch website to compete with google and microsoft lol

As it is Apple, you'd have to conform to the iSearch guidelines and if you didn't pass the approval process for your site then you wouldn't get in. You'd also not be able to link to any competing search engines or make anything that is also an Apple product line

Paul Boz

My wife still uses a Yahoo! email address which she's been using since middle school. Yahoo! is old and busted and to me doesn't have any value when there are much better alternatives out there.

I do prefer Yahoo! fantasy football over any other service but my league is at ESPN this year so I'm even getting away from Yahoo! there.

varelg

tiersten wrote: »

As it is Apple, you'd have to conform to the iSearch guidelines and if you didn't pass the approval process for your site then you wouldn't get in. You'd also not be able to link to any competing search engines or make anything that is also an Apple product line

The scariest thing is, some corporate head somewhere is reading just this and is summoning his/her developer minions to execute exactly what you said

Having the cloak of anonimity of social media, this would be justified by milions of users (although there's just some script somewhere on an iComputer tweeting in their names and updating their status) and there you have it. iSearch.