Yahoo, I just left but I may be back

I remember the days when Yahoo! was basically a public bookmark list by some clever fellows at Stanford. They'd come a long way quickly, even when portals were en vogue and everyone's least favorite uncle was creating their own portals, I still managed to stay fairly faithful to Yahoo. That of course changed in recent years, most recently with the rise of Google and the plethora of social networking sites. I'll be honest and say that in my opinion Yahoo remained kind of bloated and stagnant from a user experience point of view most of that time; though during a lot of that time they were still on top in my book, but more in the "lesser amongst the evils" kind of way. They've been on the prowl this year. Acquiring Flickr and now del.icio.us almost seems like an act of desparation. Something like "we need to be cool fast, let's buy the cool stuff and claim it as our own." I guess that's common and fortunately they're nowhere near as atrocious about it as... some other big monopolistic companies.

My take is that it took some serious ingenuity and competition to get them off their arses. That's a good thing. Whereas before they were not happy with their place but still didn't truly experiment and encourage imagination, now they see that that is the key: making stuff that's cool and works good. So I finally move my email over to their new beta email client and I have to say I'm impressed. It looks and works pretty much like what most email clients (e.g. Thunderbird) have evolved into, except through a web interface. I like it. Good for them. I hated having to page through my emails 26 at a time, and with abysmal threading and search features. They even upped their storage quota to 2Gig (direct response to Gmail) which was something I used to have to pay for. Actually I'm still annoyed that I still have to pay for POP3 access, spam filtering, etc... something that's free on at least one other free amazingly popular email service. If this had come along, oh, about half a year or a year ago, I would have been even more pleased. Sadly, it's just a liiiiiittle bit too late. I really dig the Googlemail interface. Yes it has bugs and all the features I want aren't there but I consider the basic label+conversation+search paradigm the wave of the future and the way I want to handle my email from now on. Sadly, their interface is also just a web interface and not the way my normal machine clients work so I'm kind of stuck doing things the old way with my work email and such. Ah well, maybe someday.

I'm glad to see Yahoo getting aggressive. Although I may not fully embrace their new direction, especially in the presense of some serious competition, it's still good for Joe Consumer.