Yahoo! Go

» see mobile.yahoo.com/go as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

yahoo go was a portal you carried in your pocket. the home screen had tiles for mail, maps, news, finance, sports, weather, flickr, answers, onesearch. each tile opened into the same yahoo product you knew from the desktop, redrawn for a 240 by 320 phone screen.

yahoo announced it at ces in las vegas on 6 january 2006. the first builds targeted nokia and motorola handsets via the java midp runtime. windows mobile 6 and a small pda lineup came later. it stayed in beta for every single one of its four years.

i was 22 in 2006, on a nokia in ankara, ttnet adsl at home and pay-as-you-go gprs on the phone. yahoo go was the kind of thing you read about on engadget but did not get from a turkish carrier in the box. the install path in tr was finding the jar on a forum and side-loading it over usb. the use case it covered, opening yahoo mail on a feature phone, was already covered by the mobile site at mail.yahoo.com if your phone had a browser.

~ the record ~

~ what it was actually for ~

the pitch was a unified shell. instead of opening five different mobile sites you opened yahoo go and tapped your way around. onesearch was the centerpiece, a single search field that returned context-aware results for places, stocks, sports scores, weather without forcing you through ten links of a desktop serp. flickr uploads from the camera roll worked in two taps. yahoo mail had push, when push was still rare on a non-blackberry handset.

this was a real engineering bet. the java version had to fit inside the small heap of a 2006 midp 2.0 phone and still feel like a portal. yahoo wrote a custom layout engine for it. the windows mobile build was a more conventional native app. the pda build was for the last generation of stylus-driven palm and pocket pc devices that still mattered to the enterprise crowd.

~ how it actually ended ~

the iphone shipped in mid-2007. the app store opened in july 2008. by 2009 the entire premise of a single yahoo-shell-over-everything was obsolete. you did not want a yahoo go tile for flickr, you wanted the flickr app. you did not want yahoo go finance, you wanted the standalone finance app on whatever os you were on.

yahoo announced the shutdown in late december 2009. the formal end date was 12 january 2010. the servers stopped answering by 22 january. yahoo wrote a brief note suggesting users move to the mobile web. the brand never came back. the next round of yahoo mobile bets was aviate (acquired 2013, killed 2016) and livetext (2015, killed 2016). neither tried to be a whole portal again.

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