The Yahoo! Enigma: One User's Take

Disclaimer: I fucking hate Micro$oft (from here on out, M$). I'm not the biggest fan of Yahoo! for reasons I'll get into here in a bit. And as far as Google goes, right now, they're my heroes. So, this article is going to sound a bit biased. My hatred for M$ is like walking and breathing: something I won't unlearn until the day I die, so I don't think I'll ever be able to portray them in a positive light.

That is, unless the company pulls a Red Dwarf 180 and suddenly throws open the doors to its source code so the real geeks can fix the fucking thing. Of course, that's about as likely to happen as it is likely that the Biblical Book of Revelations is more a prophetic vision than a really bad hashish dream.

Anywho, so yeah. Recently, M$ made a play for Yahoo!, offering up ~$45B in a bid to take the two largest portals on the Internet and make them into one huge, heaping pile of suck. Let's take a look at some of the consequences of such a merger:

• M$N and Yahoo! Messengers: First of all, anything from M$ is almost required to be either buggy, a resource hog, annoying and awkward to use, or any combination of the three, so already you can all guess that I don't even touch it. Yahoo!'s Messenger and chat systems can't seem to filter out spam bot traffic no matter how hard they try. Their Captcha Chat verification process? Reduced the spam bots by about 0%, while increasing user frustration nearly 10¹⁰⁰%. There's also the still-festering sore that is boot codes, and Yahoo!'s seeming refusal to even try to plug such simple DoS holes. A blending of these two seriously-broken clients has already happened, as they now allow cross-client messaging and other select features. But to take the two, blend everything all together, and you have the potential for a while new level of user meltdown.
• Flickr: Poor Flickr. Once a haven of image posting ease, now owned by Yahoo!. Yahoo! still has yet to fully intergrate Flickr's features into its site, as is evident by the still broken image capabilities in Yahoo! Profiles. M$ would love to get their hands on it to make it a part of the steaming bowl of liquid feces that is M$N, but probably more so the fact that they'd be able to change the photo licensing scheme. Flickr allows users to post photos under various Creative Commons licenses; CopyLeft, one thing M$ certainly doesn't jibe with, would risk losing a major bastion of creativity as M$ would almost certainly impose some sort of scheme to get their name all over our pictures. It's M$ that serves up Corbis images as well, so there's that to consider, too.
  
• M$N Spaces and Yahoo! 360/Geocities: Let's face it, neither of these could even try to hold a candle to Facebook and MySpace. Yahoo!'s 360 services is big and clunky and limited, and I don't even care to try M$N's offering. I've viewed a few dozen Spaces pages, and boy, do they usher in a whole new level of blah. Since Spaces can also double as a sort of website space, there's also Geocities to consider. Once upon a time, I had a Geocities page, long-since defunct due to neglect. But that was before Yahoo! took it over and (as corporations often do) made it suck. With the number of free space providers these days, coupled with the younger generation's decision to stick more with just blogs and social networking pages anymore, Geocities has become something of a Web 1.0 relic. An M$/Yahoo! merger would likely see the fork put into it once and for all...
• The Big Issue - FreEMail, Search and Portals: The core issues here are merging the two search engines and portals. M$ maintains that it would create one clear #2 to Google's search dominance (more on this later). In reality, though, it's not much to speak of search-wise. I'm a Google user (obviously), and when it comes to finding what I need, the simple answer is right up in the top right of my browser window. As far as portals are concerned, though, merging M$N and Yahoo! would create a serious imbalance in the Portal world. While Google has a decent number of good portals, most of it is devoted to user services (GMail, Blogger, Google Maps, etc.). And while GMail is hella awesome, there's little doubt that a merger of HoTMaiL and Yahoo! Mail would create a new beast that even Google would be hard-pressed to match.

So, that's really three strikes against M$, and all in core issues. The rest is just suck upon suck, so it's easy to ignore. Now, here are some potential consequences of what Fark yesterday dubbed "Yahoogle," (FT) and to be fair, I'll attack Google's major problem/roadblock first:

• Search: Let's face it: Google Rules Search. Hell, to "google" is actually a verb in the English language now. You don't search for something online, you Google it. Friend asks for a phone number or some such stupid public info and you want to encourage them to be self-sufficient? Tell them to Google it. Need directions? Google it. Google it. Google it. A Yahoogle merger would indeed create a search titan, one that M$ and their piece-of-years-old-dog-shit M$N Search would piss their collective pants in envy over. And while it would give Google quite the monopoly over search, there's no way you could even come close to calling them The Next Micro$oft (FT). That's just bullshit, and here come the reasons why...
• Portals: An acquisition of Yahoo! by Google wouldn't give them much of an edge in portals, since M$N is well-established (despite its suckitude), Google itself isn't intensely portal-driven, and there are a few other portals still out there with market share. In all reality, Yahoogle could actually create competition for M$, something that Billy Boy and the flakes in Redmond obviously have a history of disliking and trying (and often failing) to quash. So, no monopoly for Google here.
  
• FreEMail: Yahoogle Mail would be a nightmare for M$, since it would take Yahoo's crappy yet heavily used system and (hopefully) crossfade it gently into GMail's hawesome fold, thereby creating an instant army of people suddenly completely happy with their email service. GMail's spam filters are awesome, the interface is nice and clean, and let's face it: folding Yahoo! Mail into it, creating a mostly GMail-driven system, would be a serious improvement. Ask anyone with a Yahoo! account, they'll tell you what kind of hell it is. The only problems this would create? Well, bumping all them Yahoo! Mail users up to the space already available to GMail users would be quite the feat. On the good side, Google has the resources available to them, so it's possible. It would also force M$ to make some serious improvements to HoTMaiL, that's what. Innovation through competition: who knew, right? That's not a problem... For Google, but M$... Yeah, problem.
  
• Residual Stuff: The remaining chunks of Yahoo pose no serious threat to M$, even if folded into a Yahoogle banner. 360 and Geocities have already proven themselves to be both useless and sad, with the latter also having the distinction of being a senior citizen in Internet years. Google might be able to breathe new life into the former free hosting giant, blending it together somehow with Blogger and iGoogle, but it would also have to bump up the space limit for each user. With Geocities' still rather large user base, that'd be quite the bump. Again, Google most likely would have the resources to make that rollout a reality. But as for 360, no, even Google couldn't save that pile of junk. They'd be better off developing iGoogle into a mix of personal portal page and social networking page and axing the 360 arm all together.

There's even been talk of Yapple (FT), a move by still-extant upstart Apple to shield Yahoo! from The Borg (M$). Merger? Unlikely, since Apple is still behind the "different platform all together" wall that is BSD. Besides, it'd be like a liberal hippie marrying a prudish neo-conservative and concieving a child while they're both hopped up on PCP. Scary.

Yahoo employees themselves aren't too happy about the merger idea, calling it "the frosting on a double-layer suck cake." (FT)

BoingBoing has a link to a release from GoogleBlog, including the following nugget of joy:

Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft -- despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses -- to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet? In addition, Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet. Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and web-based services? Policymakers around the world need to ask these questions -- and consumers deserve satisfying answers.

As for me? I say split it. Let Google take the good stuff, minus Search, and M$ can deal with the rest of the mess. Let the mergers finish, technologies intergrate, and see what kind of bastard children we get from the three parents. I use a combination of Yahoo! and Google services, so Yahoogle would pretty much be my all-encompassing happy Internet tool if it happened the right way.

Until then, though, I think I might actually kind of enjoy sitting back and watching this bus fly off the highway. Who knows, might get rather interesting in the near future...

Get Off My Lawn

Wow. It has been forever since I've culled any content to talk about from BoingBoing. I don't know why, really. For the past two years, BB just hasn't been the major destination it once was for me. I still visit it on occasion (obviously), but I dunno. I think there might be an underlying snark vibe going on there that kinda puts me off...

At any rate, BB links to a list from Beloit College's Department of Public Affairs on the Mindset List for the Class of 2011, or those four-year college graduates born in 1990, quite the year for those of us who have memories of it (aka the "old folks.").

Some of the things on the list really stood out for me, given my perception of this particular generation, especially #55: MTV has never featured music videos. To that generation, the M has always been about "Material." Kinda makes Madonna's Material Girl oddly prophetic in a way.

See, I DO remember videos on MTV. Hell, I was nearly four years old when MTV launched on August 1st, 1981. I lived in a world without it at all, though I have little to no memory of that time, other than the arrival of my baby brother CJ that December. No different these days, really. Videos have been relegated to insomniac fare, amid the craptastic programming line-up that has polluted what was supposed to be Music Television since the first Real World.

They live in a world without true MTV.

Another one that was nifty for me was #41: The “Blue Man Group” has always been everywhere. I suppose it marks me as old that my first memory of BMG was when they were simply "The Blue Men," a performance art group that made news when they "Buried The 80s" in 1988 or '89. Struck me as odd, given the fact that the 80s still had a year and change to go, and that these guys were walking around painted blue. Years later, when they showed up in their current form, I was taken right back to that news report.

They've never seen a world without a cellphone smaller than a brick. To them, Distrubed did Land of Confusion (originally Genesis), Dope did Spin Me Round (Like a Record) (originally Dead or Alive), and "rapcore" has always been a genre of music.

As the spoiled brats known as the Class of 2011 graduate from High School this year and get slapped with the real world, I offer them this advice: It's a cold place, kids. It's not going to give you what you want, when you want it. Bundle up, add layers, and don't even think for a second that you're just going to "cruise through life." Your generation needs to learn how to not take things for granted. Only then will you be able to function in our modern society, fucked up though it may be...

Studio Goon? That's A Beatdown...

BoingBoing broke it. Fark picked it up. Wil has his $0.02 in on it. And now, it's my turn.

Warner Brothers has begun sending in goons with video cameras, and they're infiltrating a theater near you. Not to record the movie, no. To record YOU. Yep, here's an excerpt taken from an excerpt that Wil posted:

"[I]mmediately I notice an older gentleman who looked to be about 60 standing in the corner of the theater. Sporting a black suit and a black briefcase, he began to film the audience during the movie. Every 5-10 minutes he would sweep the audience with his video camera, then turn it off and just watch us, then turn the camera back on and sweep again."

Yeah. They're filming the audience, trying to catch people pirating the movie on film. And you know what? Chances are that noone saw any kind of disclosure anywhere in their theater stating that Warner was in there pulling this shit.

Privacy Violations 101: No Disclosure = Failure To Obtain Permission To Film People = Big Honking Lawsuit Against Both The Theater And Warner.

Any of you (all 6 of you, big up to Static Brain) experience this recently with any of Warner's films, such as Harry Potter 5? Horror stories in comments, please. Meanwhile, I'll be keeping a close eye on the local theaters (including the local drive-in) to see if Warner has contacted any of them to do this crap. I'll keep you posted...