| It's a very interesting question. I use yahoo a fair bit for email accounts and for reading the news. I am not sure how they monetize this activity if at all. Recently they forced me out of the old interface with email. Now I can no longer open emails I want to read by option-clicking on links to open them in new browser tabs. All mouse clicks are intercepted by the javascript on the page. Without the ability to do this the email is significantly slower and less easy to use than before. Now I am faced with finding a new email provider, and not gmail. If they had just left it alone or allowed me to use the old. No doubt others feel the same way. But what do to? Well for news I read yahoo but comment on topix, which is community oriented. Yahoo should clone that. Unlike topix, yahoo seems to license their news content which should provide an advantage. Have news discussion local like with topix. Then sell local classifieds if you get enough local activity boards going and frequented. Might be hard at this point though to get people away from topix. For me yahoo signified privacy and flexibility with the emails. I used to get news alerts on some topics but they never worked reliably or consistently. Haven't gotten one in a long time so I guess that feature was cancelled. Oh I also use yahoo groups. These groups should have cloned the functionality of ning.com, to supplement and expand the mailing list paradigm. Yahoo groups have never worked well, screwing up the formatting of most posts and not having a smooth experience for integrating media. That all should have been fixed decades ago. Then try monetizing it like ning does with pay for extras and pay to be the premium ad free host. A lot of the problems have a vibe that the programmers aren't great, or aren't around long enough to make things great. A lot has the feel of middle management dictating features to programmers rather than software designers being the developers and having the autonomy to own projects long term and make them great. |