Yahoo!

Okay, I know it's been awhile since I posted, but I've been mulling over a post on my relationship with that web juggernaut, Yahoo!, and I knew that it would take some time.
Y'see, I first found Yahoo back in college, sometime around early '97. Yahoo was still pretty new back then, and very eager to please: as with most of the 'Net in those days, everything was free. Of course, Yahoo was only a portal then, a glorified list of favorite links supplied by its inventors that was tied to a rather limited search engine. I liked Yahoo then, mostly for the free email address and quick news stories.
But then.... My real problems with the big red Y started when they bought e-groups. I was a devoted fan of e-groups, and I really liked the way they worked. I thought, 'maybe this won't be so bad, I like the way they run the portal site, maybe they'll do a good job with e-groups!' Ah, how delightfully naive I was then. But things did go along all right for awhile: the groups ran pretty much as before, and Yahoo went right on acquiring some of my other favorite sites, like Launch, and they seemed to do okay with that, too. Until, until. The dot-com bubble burst, and it all came crashing down.
First it was the email service. The size of my inbox shrank, and then I was no longer able to use a pop3 client to download my email from them without a fee. Like most people who are asked to pay for something they've always gotten gratis, my reaction was a bit huffy, to say the least. I closed several of my Yahoo email accounts forever, and swore never to trust them again.
Then they decided to make all of their adult email groups unlisted. This meant that you could make a group if you wanted, but if it was dedicated to an adult subject, you had no effective way to advertise it. You were limited to the groups and friends that you already knew, and had no way to reach the wider world. People got very upset, but once they learned that the groups were all still there, they calmed down. So, Yahoo started deleting adult groups, sometimes apparently at random. Granted, some of them probably contained questionable subject matter, but many others were no more pornographic or violent than the latest copy of Cosmopolitan. This made a LOT of people upset, which Yahoo apparently liked, too.
Then, they started unveiling their "premium" services. In most cases, this meant that they took the best features of services they already offered, and said, if you want to use those features, you must pay for them. Well, I suppose (in retrospect) that this wasn't so bad, but at the time, I was (understandably, I think) upset by the whole deal. I mean, I had five Yahoo addresses that I relied on, and once they made the pop3 access unavailable, I stopped using them. I've never really liked webmail, and I have always found Yahoo's mail page design subliminally frustrating without being able to put my finger on the feature that really causes my annoyance. So, there went my groups and my email addresses.
Since then, I've continued to use Yahoo, but warily. Every time they come out with a feature that I like, I use it with utter trepidation, sure that they'll snatch it away the minute I depend on it. In fact, I have only recently begun to use their messenger again, and that only because I can play my Launchcast station in the messenger while I'm instant messaging. I know that they have recently expanded the size of their email inboxes and the attachment size limit, but I still haven't gone back to my old email addresses for fear that I might come to rely on them again. They continue to have free radio and videos on Launch (or at least, sort of free), but I use those with caution, too, sure that very soon they will become entirely pay services.
So that, in essence, is the major part of my beef with Yahoo. They once symbolized everything the Internet was then: free, unrestricted, and instantaneous. Now, they symbolize a great deal of what the web's become: lots of advertising, lots of pay services, and not much more than one long commercial in a variety of formats.