Disjointed Yahoo: How to Catch Up
January 20, 2006 by Jayvee Fernandez
Filed under Computers
An interesting post from Paul at Great Southern Lad outlines how Yahoo lags in the Web 2.0/web application race and what it needs to do to be competitive again.
Some of his points?
1) Yahoo Mail is clunky. Yahoo is slow. Yahoo can be quite disjointed. Yahoo is not fluent to use. Utilising some Web 2.0 technology (can anyone say AJAX?) should address this.
2) Yahoo Mail does not support tagging of emails. GMail does this very well. Tagging seems to be a Web 2.0 phenomena. Yahoo Mail has been around for some time now, predating Web 2.0 by a couple of year, so this is no surprise.
3) Yahoo Briefcase and Photos must – and this is very important – expand on the 30 Mb currently available. I think 100 Mb is the absolute minimum.
4) The Gmail conversation paradigm for tracking the flow of emails is very clever. If it is not patented, Yahoo should implement it.
The only thing I would comment on is that the current Yahoo Mail is not the next generation Yahoo Mail client which is in private beta right now. I’m still trying to get my contact at Yahoo to help me out so I can see that beta, but it hasn’t come through yet even though he told me he had me bumped up in the queue. I’ll have to wait but I hear it’s way better than the legacy mail app.
