So Yahoo is in a bit of a mess is it? (link one. Link two.) Hell, I could have told them that ages ago. From years of experience I've never liked Yahoo much - from it's humble beginnings as a yellow pages-style web directory where you had to submit your own links to them for consideration (a tedious and laborious chore to slog through). I signed up for their free e-mail at a time when everybody and their dog and cat were setting up free web mail accounts for everyone... and I still occasionally use it - despite having a new ‘improved’ clunky interface that rather annoyingly refreshes every other second in order to serve up some more adverts at you... Yahoo has always been good at serving up intrusive banner ads . I was a member of their yahoo groups after they had bought out the excellent E groups - only to then set about systematically removing all the things that had made E groups good in the first place. Anyway I digress - frequently I would get an email from a group where the picture advert attachment was miles bigger than the one or two line of text the message contained… which would be followed by miles of text of Yahoo proclaiming how wonderful they were and how you too could sign up for their web mail as well. Hello, isn’t that near identical to spam?

Then there was the time when my ISP merged with Yahoo (I’m guessing BT got too lazy and flustered trying to be the internet/content providers for it’s customers and so asked Yahoo to do it all for them. Mmmmmm. Great idea getting an American company to serve British people’s needs.) and just how wonderful the Yahoo toolbar was - it added lots of flash-ridden widgetty type things all over IE - which completely trashed all my personal settings that I’d spent years getting to how I liked them. Then to add insult to injury the wretched thing wouldn’t uninstall properly. It took going back to a restore point to get rid of it completely.

It’s not that I haven’t repeatedly tried to give them a fair go either- I’ve tried My Yahoo and 360 or whatever it’s called - their clumsy half-assed version of blogger. Their Yahoo photos section is just lamentable. Oh I could go on and on. It always seemed to be that Yahoo were trying to do too much and they were doing everything pretty badly. In effect trying to actually be the whole Internet like too many companies before them. Somehow they just don’t ’get it’. They come across as mired in a deeply uncool corporate culture - and everything they do is wrapped up in acres of lawyer-speak.

But I guess lots of people must like them. Or perhaps they don't know any better.

In fact the only good thing I can say for them is that I'm glad they have left Flickr relatively intact - although being made to sign up to yahoo and have a yahoo ID (hoping you'll wander on to their other services no doubt) is teh suck. If they do have a cull though - I wonder which will go - flickr or yahoo photos (I wouldn't be surprised if they make the stupid choice)