RIP: My Yahoo

Yahoo has been my "primary residence" since I first left my virtual birthplace, the UNIX-based .edu domain of the University of Pennsylvania. When I moved to Yahoo my online presence was decoupled from any one service provider, giving me a certain virtual permanence I didn't realize I was looking for. Knowing this would be my home for a long time to come, I began that long journey every new homeowner looks forward to, making your new digs truly yours. My mail was first to move in. I went from ELM to Yahoo web-based mail. Then it was chat. I stopped using ytalk, frequented fewer chat rooms, and found myself always available on Y! Messenger. Finally, it was content. I no longer spent hours hopping from one URL to another, instead preferring the neat way content could be aggregated on My Yahoo.

By the end of the 1990's, I was all settled in and felt comfortable that my new home would grow and change to fit the technology and trends of the day. I figured that no matter what new widget or service popped up, My Yahoo would be the place where I would aggregate and consume information. It catalogued, it indexed, it aggregated, and it even hosted media and provided premium video services (remember that partnership with FIFA in 2002?). But there were cracks on the foundation from day one. I spent more time reading daily news feeds sent to my e-mail than I did on the My Yahoo page I had created for the same purpose. I realized Y! Messenger was not going to help me link up with those that had chosen different chat clients. Using Yahoo as a search engine yielded questionable results since they contained as many directories and categories as actual hits. And as for media, Yahoo was never even in the running with competitors like Napster and YouTube, or more mainstream outlets like iTunes.

My Yahoo became a McMansion, oversized and indistinct. Every attempted improvement just gave me another reason to move. Its mail reader is bloated and reminiscent of a Microsoft application. Its homepage, redesigned and still in beta, made half-hearted improvements to the portal shell and the content modules achieving mediocrity on both. Even its attempt at providing mobile content seems laughable in comparison to Google's mobile sites, which stripped formatting not content. Add to the list calendar services, address books, groups, "pipes", maps, and so on and so on.

Was My Yahoo attempting to integrate all aspects of my virtual life seamlessly? Who knows. Who knows what it wanted to be when it grew up. It doesn't seem to matter anymore. I'm in the process of moving again. I have moved searching, news and feeds to iGoogle. I chat via interoperable services like Trillian, Fire, and Fring. I socialize on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. I consume media via YouTube and iTunes. Maybe the value of My Yahoo is in the lessons it has to share as jack of all trades, master of none, lessons Apple (as it launches MobileMe) and Google (as it eats Yahoo's lunch) should be studying hard. It could be that both of these companies mastered the one lesson Yahoo seems to have missed early on... get the components right first and then aggregate them.

In any case I hope My Yahoo sticks around, at least it can be that PO Box that stays constant even as I have long moved to best-in-class online services.