posted 2007/06/03 at 14:55
Over the years I've mentioned several times how many of Yahoo!'s services I use and how happy I've been with them. Over the past few days, though, I've noticed a considerable downturn in the quality of the Yahoo! services I use, and it's making me wonder if it isn't time for me to go all-Google here.
Let's start with Yahoo! Mail, since I've had an account there since its earliest days, and even though I still use .org-based e-mail for my most important transactions, not a day goes by when I don't use my Yahoo! Mail account for one purpose or another. A couple of days ago Yahoo! rolled out the integration of their messenger client into their mail service, which you'd think would be a good thing. The problem is, for one thing, I haven't used Yahoo! Messenger in forever -- I used to use it quite often, but these days I use AIM more simply because that's what most of my friends have -- and as a result, I have a lot of "stored messages" that positively inundate the Yahoo! Mail screen with extra tabs that break the design. That alone would be bad enough, but now the mail software doesn't load right half the time, and it usually takes me two or three reloads to even be able to click on my messages from the inbox. Given that checking my Yahoo! Mail is usually my second task of the day on my computer (the first being to check my .org mail), this is not making me happy.
I still check My Yahoo! every day during lunch as a way to check up on news and other daily tidbits very quickly, and I still think that Yahoo!'s interface for doing this is a lot better than the one Google recently rolled out. However, over the past few days I've noticed that whenever I load up a My Yahoo! page, it takes about ten seconds between the time I click on a link and when IE makes the "you clicked on a link" sound. Normally this would make me worry about something being on my computer, but the My Yahoo! pages are the only pages this is happening on, and I did an extra virus scan on my computer overnight just to make sure I didn't have anything nasty loaded onto it. I appreciate how much work went into the recent overhaul of My Yahoo!, but I should not be experiencing these kinds of delays. Particularly given how much of a rush I tend to be in the early part of the day so I can get to other things, having this kind of slowdown on My Yahoo! is a huge pain.
I've got a résumé on HotJobs, of course, but it hasn't exactly yielded me much in the way of leads, except for a few cut-rate insurance companies asking me to sell for them. I haven't used Messenger in so long that I don't even have it installed on my computer now, following the hard drive crash I had over a year ago. I tried Yahoo's music software, but I couldn't get it to stop changing the tags on some of my MP3s and messing up the sorting order I'd made for them. As big a fan of Launchcast as I am, I haven't been using that much recently either, and shortly after I made that post about Urge Radio a few days ago I found out that they have a station called Blue Room that sounds like I programmed it, so I've had that on in the background for most of the past few days' work.
I'm not sure if I'm read to start transfering all of my services over to Google's equivalents (at least the Google services that match up with Yahoo! equivalents), but it's certainly been on my mind a bit these past few days. Perhaps these problems I'm having with Yahoo!'s services are only temporary, but my patience with them is starting to run a little bit thin now.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon