Yahoo!'s place in a Google world

I'm not ashamed to admit it: my default homepage is set to Yahoo!. No, not google. Yahoo!. Unlike my fellow collegians who have welcomed Google with open arms, I've remained cautious, even unwilling at times, to join the Google bandwagon. Call it a virtual comfort zone if you will, but Yahoo! has been my portal to the web ever since I first started using the internet. Throughout middle school and high school, any time I sought resolve to the inquiries construed by my inner-nerd or closeted sexuality, Yahoo! was there to provide me, and my hormones, with answers. In that era of chats and searches, online games and emails, I was on team Yahoo!. There were others, like AltaVista and Lycos, that competed for my attention traffic, but none came close to usurping my allegiance from Yahoo!. Eventually they faded into obscurity, leaving Yahoo! king of the virtual kingdom.

Life for me was good when Yahoos roamed the web.

But then came the calamitous dot-com bubble. Yahoo narrowly survived, but the internet landscape was forever changed. Newer, fitter, species emerged, making it more difficult for old dinosaurs like Yahoo! to thrive. But thanks to its well-known brand and legion of loyal followers, Yahoo! maintains, as precarious as it may be, a position at the top. The highly coveted online community it's fostered over the years remains its most important asset. Without the legion of followers to sustain one of the most vibrant, active, communities on the web, Yahoo! has nothing. In a world of Web 2.0 where application synergy dominates the pecking order, Yahoo! - and Microsoft for that matter - fall tragically short of Google's superiority.

So why do I stay with Yahoo?

In all honesty, I haven't been so loyal. I've pretty much stopped using Yahoo! altogether except for keeping up with daily AP headlines and conducting sporadic searches. I needed Yahoo! for its utilities, not the community, and now that its utilities are virtually irrelevant, I have little reason to stay with Yahoo!. So what can Yahoo! do to win me back? I see two solutions.

1) Improve infrastructure. Yahoo! has a semi-decent interface, but its applications are deplorable. Virtually every program offered is superseded by an alternative equivalent located elsewhere on the web. Google, Amazon, Ebay, etc. are just a few examples of web outlets with far better email, retail, and auctioning capabilities. If Yahoo! ever wants to be more competitive, it needs to subsume these successful models (or companies) into its own offerings. As I write this, my friend Max turned to me and said "why do you use Gchat instead of AIM?" Because like AIM, yahoo's chat is cumbersome to have running when all of the people I care to chat with on a daily basis already use Gchat/Gmail, bringing me to my next point:

2) Improve community. Yahoo!'s community, admittedly large and diverse, is still mostly over the age of 40 and ill-equipped to operate in the 21st century's digital era. And even though I, like the rest of the Yahoo community, enjoy the Price is Right and World News Tonight with Charlie Gibson, I more closely resemble the typical Google user; young, 20-something yuppie who's completely saturated in online networking, culture and information.

So when Dan walks in and asks me what I'm blogging about, he laughs when I tell him the topic is my reluctance to switch from Yahoo to Google, not because the topic is particularly funny, persay, but because he knows that I'm actually still lame enough to continue using inferior Yahoo over Google.

I suppose I should mention Microsoft's recent bid to take over Yahoo!. A wise attempt to capture this vulnerable community (and market share), but ultimately a useless venture. The younger generation will continue to use Google and the Yahoo dinosaurs will eventually go extinct, lest they adapt themselves to be more successful in the future era of Web 3.0.