Let's make that one star, now that they're going to shut down Geocities, without having bothered to send any of its users any e-mail about this. Most of us, with sites on that service, found out by reading stories like this:
The fun part is that Geocities, pre-Yahoo, had an FTP server! That would been very helpful, right now, a much easier way of recovering content than unrendering individual pages and cutting and pasting the code to files on one's own disk. Yahoo has seen no need to reactivate that server, or even to construct any software to use for transferring Geocities pages to their paid server, telling users to cut and paste, and then FTP their newly constructed pages up to their new location. On a server belonging to the same (expletitive deleted) company.
More than a little evil, and one reason why I chose to move my material to the server of a completely different company. Quoting the article cited above as it quotes the new CEO of Yahoo, Carol Bartz
"The best candidate for focused investment and renewed innovation are those products that generate the majority of our traffic and corresponding economic value. These include the homepage, sports, news, finance, entertainment, mail search and mobile."
One might note the absence of the remaining sites hosting user generated content in that list, such as Flickr. Yahoo's new future is going to consist primarily of taking stories off of the AP feed (see first five products in Bartz' list). Which means that your content really isn't safe on Yahoo, which will soon be offering you little that you weren't getting out of your local newspaper, anyway, raising the question of why one would bother to visit their site, at all.
Yahoo's contribution to its users, most of whom are on services it had nothing to do with creating - eg. Flickr, Yahoogroups (formerly eGroups), Geocities, Jumpcut, Upcoming, Delicious - has primarily consisted of taking over companies that were functioning decently enough before they arrived and slowly running them into the ground or shutting them down, altogether. It didn't even invent its own search engine. Altavista did that, the biggest change after the Yahoo takeover being that link searches no longer worked properly.
I hesitated to give Yahoo an overall rating before, saying that it was more like a cluster of many little companies than like one large one, making generalizations difficult. Perhaps, but a pattern does seem to emerge after a while. The web would be a far better place today, had this company never been.
Did anybody at Yahoo ever stopped to think that maybe one of the reasons why they're having more and more trouble getting new users to subscribe to the services they offer is because so many of us, with good historical reasons, having come to the conclusion that posting content to Yahoo is a lot like throwing it out?
References: original review
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