
Yahoo is Number One in So Much More Than Search - HoneyAndSilicon
http://www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2009/07/16/16gigaom-yahoos-number-ones-so-much-more-than-search-83599.html
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jacquesm
I honestly can't remember the last time I even used Yahoo. Am I alone in this
or is this common ?

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BearOfNH
I use Yahoo finance many times daily, much more often than Google finance or
other sites. Yahoo offers real-time update of broad market indices and delayed
update of my favorite stocks on their main page, along with headlines and
videos of the top business stories. It's a nice information packaging job.

Of course my broker supplies all that data and more, but they don't understand
the complexities of corporate firewalls and http tunneling. Not to mention
information stovepiping -- you know, one page for news, a separate page for
quotes, another page for charts ... Yahoo integrates all that for free.

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tybris
I used Yahoo finance before the market tanked (No, really before, I got out in
time). I loved how easy it was to view up to 100 years of history of almost
anything. Certainly helped me believe there was absolutely no reason my modest
portfolio would grow much further on the stock market.

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GeneralMaximus
Yahoo! has lost its reputation within geek circles. Google have not only put
out really great products, they also go to great lengths to boast about their
vastly superior technologies (BigTable, MapReduce), which gets them a lot of
(well-deserved) geek love. Then there are Android and Chrome (with V8), both
of which are pretty exciting to hackers. Also, Summer of Code, Code Jam etc.
get Google a lot of street cred.

So, from a tech standpoint, Yahoo! isn't very exciting. They're still the same
old portal website from the 90's. But for the average guy, Yahoo! still gives
him what he needs, when he needs it. Non-tech people don't like to hop from
one place to another.

I haven't been to any of Yahoo!'s services for over an year now, but that
doesn't mean they're irrelevant.

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zmimon
I agree with you about the "not exciting" part, but I disagree about their
reputation in geek circles - at least "real" geek circles and not just tech
digerati that are obsessed only with what is changing and new and what drives
traffic to their blog sites.

Yahoo pump out loads of tech stuff all the time - YUI, Hadoop, YSlow, YUI
Compressor are all hugely respected and popular tools. They've write articles
and published research that are almost definitive references for things like
web site optimization. They have a boat load of web service APIs that are used
all over the place and some of them are very innovative. It's worth just
browsing around <http://developer.yahoo.com/> to see all the stuff they have
going.

(No, I don't work for Yahoo or have any association.)

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IsaacSchlueter
Don't forget YQL, the weather APIs, Pipes, and Flickr. I personally think BOSS
was a bit mishandled, but it has really great potential, as does YAP/YOS.

Yahoo is one of the largest collection of professional web developers, and
they take that seriously. Of course, their money is in Average Joe offerings
like News and Frontpage.

I do work for them, and for a developer offering team too boot, so this is
quite biased, of course ;)

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sha90
Yahoo has been my homepage since '96. I'm oldschool.

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jsonscripter
Homepage? I don't even have a homepage, just whatever tabs I had open last
time.

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w1ntermute
Same here, it's either that or 1 blank tab if I closed all my tabs last time.

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jimmybot
Maybe I'm a little to obsessive with the original source thing... I was going
to complain again about the link being nytimes.com instead of the original
from gigaom.com

(From the guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a blog post
reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter." )

But then this really leapt out at me:

 _"Yahoo News is the No. 1 news and information site in the country, with more
than 50 million monthly unique readers, ahead of The New York Times network’s
45 million."_

Wow, that says as much about The New York Times as it does about Yahoo News.
Does the broad readership of the NYT surprise anyone else?

The New York Times certainly was big 15 years ago and by some measures, the
number one paper by reputation, but no where near this big. A few things that
made me really surprised at 45 million:

1) Like all the other newspapers, it suddenly needs a new business model.
Isn't everyone going to blogs, aggregators, and their niche sources for their
news? I know part of this is the inability to monetize the online readership
in the same way as their traditional readership, but still.

2) NYT is written at a fairly sophisticated level and its liberal slant
doesn't really appeal to a lot of people. Its understandable obsession with
its hometown, New York City, both draws, but also repels a lot of people.

3) Hey, what 'bout CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc? Those seem much more generally
appealing than the NYT.

Thoughts?

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DannoHung
> 2) NYT is written at a fairly sophisticated level and its liberal slant
> doesn't really appeal to a lot of people. Its understandable obsession with
> its hometown, New York City, both draws, but also repels a lot of people.

About half the country has voted Democrat in the last three Presidential
elections. The Congress is now >50% Democrat as well.

Conservative voices are just the loudest and most annoying.

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dotcoma
Yahoo! still sees itself as a "media company". Poor things.

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shib71
Your patronising tone is a little silly. Newspapers may be dying out, but
there will always be a place for "media companies". Few people are willing to
depend on Twitter and the blogosphere for news, and Yahoo is one of the few
companies that are successfully meeting the changing news needs.

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dotcoma
I'm not necessarily against media companies such as newspapers. Actually, I
hope at least a few really make it, or we're in trouble.

But Yahoo thinks they are a "media company" because they sell banners on
Yahoo! Mail (...). And, frankly, I don't see them meeting the changing media
needs...

