My Yahoo!

» see my.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

yahoo was my main webmail through the early 2000s. my yahoo was the customizable homepage layer above it that i opened maybe twice. honestly, i used the yahoo.com directory front page out of habit and never bothered to set up the personal version. in turkey around 2003 most people i knew did the same. it was easier to memorize yahoo.com and let the homepage be whatever yahoo had on it that day.

the product had launched on july 15 1996, two years after yahoo itself. the idea was to give every account a personal arrangement of modules instead of the one-size-fits-all directory. for whatever reason, the early version was thin: a weather tile next to a small stock-quote strip. by the early 2000s the module catalog had widened. you could pin sports scores, lottery numbers, a tv guide, your email preview, horoscopes. in those days. the layout was a three-column grid you could drag pieces around inside.

the second wind came in 2005 when yahoo added RSS aggregation to the module catalog. you pasted a feed url into a tile, my yahoo polled it, the headlines rendered in the homepage grid. that turned the product from a portal sidebar into a real feed reader. it was the same window when google launched igoogle (2005) and bloglines was peaking. anyway, my yahoo had a couple million RSS subscribers at its highest, mostly americans who treated their browser homepage as a news front.

but the slow death started around 2013. yahoo killed the classic interface in 2014 over user revolt. anyway, by 2016 the RSS layer had been silently broken in places, by 2020 the product had stopped getting feature updates. for whatever reason, marissa mayer's strategy reset never landed on my yahoo specifically, the page just stayed there in maintenance mode for a decade after the rest of yahoo had pivoted to mobile.

the announcement came in 2024. on december 11 yahoo redirected my.yahoo.com to the static yahoo.com homepage and turned off the customization backend. the help page replaced itself with a 'my yahoo is discontinued' notice. there was no farewell post. the 28-year customization layer above the directory was just gone one tuesday.

~ the record ~

~ how it actually worked ~

the model was modules-on-a-grid before that was a desktop dashboard cliche. you logged in, picked tiles from a catalog, dropped them in the column you wanted. each tile was an iframe of yahoo content or an RSS feed renderer. there was no plugin api in the public sense. yahoo controlled the catalog, partners could submit tiles for review.

in fairness, the rss layer was what kept my yahoo alive when igoogle launched. google's product was technically prettier and had real third-party gadgets through opensocial. my yahoo had the bigger user base and a feed reader the same shape as bloglines underneath. when bloglines died in 2010 some of that crowd migrated up to my yahoo instead of google reader. anyway, the migration was small, the my yahoo cohort was older.

~ the rss years ~

between 2006 and 2010 my yahoo was a real rss client without being marketed as one. honestly, the product page never used the word 'feed reader'. it sat behind a 'add content' button on the homepage editor. tech bloggers wrote roundups of feed readers in 2007 and my yahoo always appeared on the lists despite yahoo not pushing it.

the same window made my yahoo the closest thing yahoo had to a daily-active product outside webmail. google reader died in july 2013 and people scrambled. some migrated to feedly or to the newer inoreader, others fell back on my yahoo because they already had a yahoo account. the spike was real for about a year before it leveled off.

~ what got buried with it ~

the layouts went with the product. people had spent years arranging their own homepage, the muscle memory of where the weather tile lived versus the email preview. when my yahoo went to redirect, those layouts were not migrated, the feeds were not exported. yahoo did not offer an opml download. the rss subscription list of every my yahoo user, often built up across a decade or more, was simply erased on december 11.

this was the same erasure pattern as google reader 2013, but eleven years later and quieter. nobody wrote retrospectives the day my yahoo went down. the cohort had thinned by then. for whatever reason, the product had outlasted the cultural moment that valued it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »