So it's been an interesting few weeks in my own personal Internet worldview and that interestingness, to borrow a term, seems to have bubbled out into the world at large. I'm talking about the long-dreaded forced merge of the Flickr and Yahoo login IDs. Sadly, there are about a dozen points I'd like to hit in this post and I have absolutely no chance, at this hour, of crafting them into a coherent narrative. That said, I did want to put up some very personal notes on the situation and my own recent predicament with Yahoo!'s trajectory. Here they are; get 'em before I realize how idiotic I sound and condense them all into a haiku.
- I was at Yahoo (as a member of the editorial staff) for 5 years. I've now been gone for 5 years. That symmetry just occurred to me about an hour ago.
- I had www.yahoo.com as my homepage since the days of Mosaic. 12 years, by my count. (In 2006, I began using multiple tabs at startup, but Yahoo was still always in there.)
- Last week, I just got so very tired of the horrendous crap that the "Featured" module on Yahoo's front page was feeding me that I gathered the strength to rip the Band-Aid off and stop using yahoo.com altogether. The last straw was something along the lines of "People Do the Darnedest Things While They're Driving!" with a stock photo of a grinning motorist. An inch below that, a headline read "100 Dead in Fighting in Baghdad." The cognitive dissonance had just become too much. It was so clear, in that moment, that the human spirit had long since left that page, and it wasn't coming back. I could go on and on about how sad I get over this, but it would just make my years of denial all the more pitiable.
- Not suprisingly, I haven't missed the utility of www.yahoo.com one iota. And I feel a lot better not having to see the constant stream of drivel.
- Sooooo, after having just beaten the dead horse that I rode in on, I want to say this to anyone who thinks that the current Yahoo-Flickr "controversy" is a cause worthy of the sturm und drang that people seem intent on whipping up.... YOU ARE INSANE.
- If you think the chuckleheads at Yahoo have screwed up, or are about the screw up Flickr, I invite you to dry your tear-stained cheeks with the peals of maniacal laughter from the users of WebRing or, um, say, GeoCities, or any number of other disasterrific product "integrations" over the company's history.
- That's not to say Yahoo screws everything up. Although that's clearly the public perception.
- I think that Yahoo's approach to flickr, del.icio.us, and upcoming.org has been great. As you can imagine, I've usually been less than thrilled with Yahoo's Katamari-like acquistion routine.
"Thanks for buying Oddpost, guys! Now, can you maybe get the product out of Beta before the original founders file for Social Security? M'kay."
- I too waited until the 11th hour to merge my Yahoo and Flickr IDs. I did it last month. The psychology of it is the only difficult part. My experience with Flickr hasn't changed. Easy peasy.
- Other random notes: "School" is spelled s-c-h-o-o-l in almost all contexts. As an editor, I would advise going with "old school" rather than "old skool." It's all about knowing your audience: People who like things to be clever are fine with the term "automagically"; people who consider themselves passionate, true believers don't like to be addressed ironically. I'm just saying, I would've gone another way with it.
- Thomas Hawk, as has already been pointed out by my friend and coworker Anil Dash, is acting badly by piling on. I'd always thought of Hawk as a pretty positive force, sharing a lot of knowledge and fighting for photographer's rights. But acting as the Pied Piper for inevitable communal handwringing? C'mon. I'm not saying you have to like it. I'm not saying you should hold your criticism. But reblogging negative reactions? Is there any reason why those interested can't actually read the thread for themselves and see the entire context?
- Here's a thought that's been percolating in my mind for about 8 years. Yahoo doesn't scale. Yeah, yeah, that's not a news flash. You can't build a hierarchical directory for the Web, as it turns out. You have to just take snapshots and search terms and pluck some very good guesses out of the ever-growing pile. But that's not what i'm talking about. I'm talking about the idea that there's should be a human face to massive web services. The metaphor of Yahoo is a human-powered presentation of the world, while the metaphor of Google is a machine-powered presentation of the world (as filtered through the collective intelligence of the individuals in it). Never mind the reality, those are the stories, and I guess what I'm saying is that at a certain point, no matter how hard you try, you can't put a truly human face on a product produced by 1000, 5000, 20000 people. That is, unless you get out of the way and let the collective truth emerge organically. Or inorganically, rather.
- Final note: I'm really excited about 30 Rock. I was beginning to feel sad about TV in a big way. Thanks, Tina Fey!
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