Do You Still Yahoo?

by on Mar 1, 2010 | 22 comments

Before Google, the way people used to check to see if their internet was working properly was to load up yahoo.com. I remember those days. It was a long, long time ago.

The only thing people are buzzing about when it comes to Yahoo! these days is how much nobody cares about them anymore. The last big thing they did which caused a huge wave of nostalgia is when they closed Geocities back in October 2009.

Yahoo used to be #1 in search if you can believe it. But ever since they lost that title, they’ve never quite been able to recapture the magic, even when they had weird advertisements on television. (Side note: This is how to do a tech commercial right.)

Even with the ever-decreasing Y! has these days, there are still those that still use Y! products regularly, so my question to you is: Do you Yahoo?

If you do, what do you use? Search? Mail? Messenger? Flickr? Weather?

Or did you give up using Y! altogether for something else?

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  • Ahmed Kamal

    Yahoo mail. Because my yahoo email address is older (way older) than Gmail and there are people who “forward” emails to yahoo address.

  • http://www.virtualpreacher.org Yohan Perera

    I still use Y! mail. Not to handle serious incoming and out-coming emails, but for commenting on other blogs, to accept my blog’s database backup etc.

    In addition I use Flickr. Looks like most Computer users and bloggers cannot live without Flickr of course…

  • Brian

    I use yahoo mail as my primary personal email, and occasionally yellow pages. I still think their yellow pages works about the best, and they are certainly better than just using search if you are looking for a particular type of business in a particular area. I have been using yahoo email since the 90′s, and I would hate to give up my e-mail address.

    I remember when Yahoo! was new, really almost a new concept (web portal). I had been using web crawler, etc. for search when one of my classmates told me to check out Yahoo!

  • HAL9000

    Yahoo is dead to me… Nobody is ever online Yahoo messenger anymore and I have enough email addresses.

  • Al Richter

    Yahoo is good. It has always been, despite some annoying things they have done along the way by way of “making things better still”. The mailbox is capacious, and spam filtering, albeit not without some too-positive-discrimination glitches, effective. I have a nicely organized MyYahoo home page, with a full set of international news in a few languages and other everyday information I am after, all at more or less one glance. Messenger is OK, although I use it only while on my emails to exchange quick missives with a small circle of friends. Yahoo Finance is comprehensive. Yahoo Travel can come in handy with pretty good travel guides and travellers´ experience. I think there is more to Yahoo than meets the eye, so do not knock it – use it. You will be better off. (By the way, I have no interest to declare.)

  • David M

    I use their email for no other reason than I have had that email address for years and it would be a big PITA to change over to a new email address because so many websites that I use have my yahoo email address referenced as the place to send my password in case I ever lose my password or forget which user name I use. I can’t even remember how many websites that I have given my yahoo email address to.

    What would be sweet is an application that could figure that out for me in case I ever wanted to use Google Mail or whoever as my primary email address.

    Otherwise, I don’t have any reason to visit Yahoo’s website. My default website for my Firefox browser is Google. For me, Google does a good enough job at finding whatever information I am looking for on the internet. Its pretty rare now when I use a different search engine.

    • http://www.menga.net Rich Menga

      http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop.html

      You can put both your Y! and Gmail address(es) in that app and switch back and forth between them easily Outlook-ish style via the left sidebar. Works very nicely if you’re looking to switch providers incrementally instead of all at once.

  • Larry

    I never was much of a Yahoo fan Years ago I always used Lycos I created a website on Tripod My first email address was at mail city Recently I have gone a little Retro and I use Lycos as my home page

  • David Kennedy

    I’ve used Yahoo for their fantasy football. But, IMO, even that’s behind it’s competitors these days.

    Rarely, I use their directories…sometimes that beats search, especially for local services. But, there are other places to get that information from as well.

  • Bryan

    I read most popular news on Y! homepage but i am getting pretty done with that. I find that I get lost in the clutter on Y! homepage. Otherwise, I moved to Gmail a couple years ago. Its support of free POP3 blows Yahoo Mail out of the water and it was worth the move.

  • David M

    Thanks Rich for the link to Zimbra. :)

  • Juppy

    My Yahoo Mail account was the first online email account I ever set up. Still got it, although it doesn’t get used much anymore. It’s basically the email account I use when registering with sites that I think might hammer me with spam afterwards. Sort of the junk mail, catch-all account, if you will.

    I used to use Yahoo Messenger, but stopped that a long time ago.

  • Mark

    I still use Yahoo! Mail as my primary email account, having had it for years. The Classic version is still my preferred option.

  • justin

    I still use Yahoo for a backup Email adress, Answers and Freecycles. Yahoo is dead to me otherwise

  • Kelly

    Absolutely!

    Did Gmail for a while; came back to Yahoo.

    In my experience, Yahoo mail interface is snappier and I am old fashioned because I prefer to keep my mail organized in an hierarchical structure vs. tags.

    I don’t really like the threaded conversation views in Gmail.

    I like the new Yahoo Calendar beta much better than Google calendar; it offers a little more flexibility, and synchronizes very well with iCal. Yahoo contacts also synchronize very well with Address Book on my Mac.

    I forward my Gmail to my Yahoo.

    By the way, has anyone else noticed lately that Gmail has become very slow? I have heard many complaints recently from co-workers that the Gmail interface has become sluggish, requiring many F5 refreshes; and that mail sent from Gmail to recipients outside of Gmail have been taking a long time to arrive.

    I also prefer Yahoo bookmarks / Delicious over Google Bookmarks.

    Yahoo News!, Yahoo Buzz and Yahoo Answers are good sites. I also prefer the My Yahoo personalized portal options over those of iGoogle.

  • Joe

    I don’t use Yahoo Messenger anymore, and I don’t use my webmail account much.
    However, I still use Yahoo Groups for info on health.

  • Korie Dread

    Yes I still use all of yahoo services except for the search. My email address are old and been around before those others.

  • Aaron

    Yahoo is great because of the mail and news pages. Its the best email iv e ever used. As for search, especially on a mobile device, Google a better search engine.

  • lespaul20

    Still use yahoo mail. Have some of my browsers home page set to yahoo.

  • Juppy

    Kelly > Yeah, Gmail slowed way down for me too when they went to the new version. Only fix I found was to stick with the older version. You don’t get to use all the fancy little Google Labs add-ons, but at least the page loads on the first shot with the old version. The new version on my machine always times out and says it didn’t load several things on the page. Grrrrr!! I just hope they keep allowing us to use this older version, because the new versions are way slow for a lot of people.

    There should be a link in the upper right corner for the older version. If you decide to use that one all the time, you’ll need to copy the address from the address bar and put a link in your favorites/bookmarks area or something, because the next time you log on using the link from the main google page, it will take you right back to the new version again.

  • Jon

    I still use it for the 500 disposable addresses that I can configure to combat SPAM. By using a specific address, when I have to use one to access something (like leaving this reply), I can immediately identify who used or provided my email address to spammers – and then blow it out and cut off the offender. It’s been pretty effective.

  • Jase

    I use yahoo mail, I simply no longer have a choice.

    My ISP decided to ditch their internal mail servers in 2007 and point everything through yahoo mail instead.

    Yahoo mail still beats hotmail though, and I don’t trust Uncle Google’s privacy policy one iota.

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