Delicious, Yahoo! Buzz, MyBlogLog, AltaVista all face axe Yahoo! is reportedly in the process of retiring eight products, following the company's announcement earlier this week that it planned to axe 600 jobs worldwide. Products on the hit list include Delicious, Yahoo! Buzz, MyBlogLog and AltaVista. However, so far the struggling web portal has only officially confirmed that Yahoo …
Other free bookmarking services are available, and you can export your bookmarks from delicious.
Shame yahoo missed a trick with this. the bookmarks users tagged in delicious could have been used to provide targeted advertising on subjects with those tags, yet delicious is ad-free perhaps to the pleasure of some,.
The stackexchange family of websites, and goodle themselves seem to get it done right with well positioned non-imposing adverts.
The other trick is the user voted search potential, as opposed to machine generate search results. The side effect of delicious as a social bookmarking tool is that searching within it always produces results selected by people, popularity is automatic by the amount a result is linked by its users, rather than a more vague rating system.
digg, stumbleupon, offer alternative delicious.
Otherwise you might want to do a diaspora style approach and host your bookmarks yourself, with cheap shared web hosting and free Drupal and the userlinks module this would largely provide delicious functionality. Then federate your machine with other people doing the same and you have the social, bookmark sharing element.
http://drupal.org/project/userlink
Don't get too misty eyed regarding ye old days, because the days of AltaVista, 56k modems are also the days that I paid £250 quarterly bills to BT on a regular basis (damn MUDing ...) before Freeserve. Oh, that sometimes involved a two-hour wait to actually connect due to demand!
All that needs to be said, is that I didn't even realise that these services haven't already gone the way of geocities. Then again, we are talking about the company that turned down c$44.6bn (£22.4bn) from Microsoft (whose shareholders, no doubt, uttered a sigh of relief).
I finally made the switch from Yahoo to Gmail this year because Gmail offered threaded conversations amongst other things. Although, Yahoo.com is still my home-page for (i) a snapshot of news headlines as I log on, and for (ii) sentimental reasons. But aside from maybe Flickr and maybe Yahoo games (for those who like such things), Yahoo has become increasingly irrelevant - and I wonder if maybe the decline is terminal.
I also liked Altavista and remember the old address.
altavista.digital.net
However, what I do remember is that suddenly the search results got poisoned. I was at university at the time and it was really embarrassing. I would search for almost anything that was computer related, and all that would be in the first page were x-rated websites! That really annoyed me and it was because of this that I went to Google.
Their customer service was piss poor.
Their failure to work respectfully with and for - we the people - who are paying their wages..... unforgivable.
The corporation stupidity - of people who don't know, don't care, and who provide idiot lip service at best; and the never follow up on anything...
And there is the idiot impenetrable email firewall or dickheads on the phone line...
After seeing how bad they really are - I pulled all my clients accounts from them and took the business elsewhere.
So while Yahoo do nothing about spam on their email service, emails take hours or days to arrive....
Hmmm staff who's idea if service is to "be nice Sir", rather than do the job I am PAYING them for, and actually do it, instead of reading off the fucking scripts....
Fuck Yahoo..........
... they will put the kibosh on any email sent to "too many" addresses (where "too many" is in the neighborhood of 50, from my experience); it's probably more accurate to say that they do "spam prevention theater" the way TSA does security theater.
Too bad, because other than this I have generally had a positive experience using Yahoomail.
... I believe that Yahoo is sinking and sinking fast. This only lends credence to my belief.
If Yahoo wants to survive, they better position someone with vision (preferably the person currently in charge of Flickr) before they close up every possible service (Eg, Geocities, Auctions, Briefcase, et al).
Whoever is in charge of Flickr is thinking out of the box and innovatively, and probably has the ability to pull yahoo out of it's current quagmire.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/thumb_down_32.png
I have difficulty imagining just how it is that Yahell even exists anymore. Time and again they have complete screwed up stuff that had been working fairly well. I jumped ship years ago and try to have as little as possible to do with them.
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