Yahoo’s plan to be more “Open and Social”

December 10th, 2008 at 10:45 am

I would rather you have done away with my Yahoo! 360 then my “old” yahoo profile! The feature on the old member/directory/profile have you the option to hide or show online to other users. The “new” yahoo beta profile doesn’t have that option. I have gone back to my old yahoo member/directory/profile and tried MANY times to “uncheck” the feature to show online to other users! All it does when I uncheck the box and click finished editing is redirect me to my Yahoo beta profile.

When I go back and look at my old Yahoo member directory/profile the box has amazingly rechecked it’s self!! So, I had to create a NEW yahoo messenger ID..and the NEW one is not giving me the headaches that I have been having for over a week now with my old Yahoo messenger ID…I’m not talking about creating an alias either but a whole NEW yahoo messenger ID.

When created the NEW yahoo messenger ID I DID NOT bother with the NEW beta profile!!

This “new beta profile” does the same thing as the Yahoo! 360..so why not delete the Yahoo! 360 accounts??

December 10th, 2008 at 10:58 am

Sounds like a bunch of wasted effort, to me, and for me. I used Messenger, Mail, and My Yahoo. I don’t give a rat’s posterior about Buzz, or Local, or Groups. I don’t care what the people I email, or chat with have been doing on the web.

I say “used” because I’ve since moved on to Google. I just pop in here to see if everyone is still up in arms over the changes.

It’s still a lame change.

December 10th, 2008 at 11:00 am

Why is social being implemented on the mail pages? I can understand why it would be implemented on My Yahoo! on the profiles, and on 360 although I haven’t heard that it will be implemented across 360 (the most suitable place imo), but as a user of mail services I would find it an inconvenience to have all sorts of aps and information about what everybody is doing on my mail homepage. When I go to mail, I want to read my messages or send messages. I don’t go for any other reason. I realise that using Outlook means I don’t have to put up with loads of stuff I don’t want to see, but I would prefer for the Mail interface to be as clean as the Google Mail interface where if I use the Basic HTML, I have only my inbox and other mail folders, and the ability to send messages. Hotmail is cluttered with ads, now it seems that Yahoo! is going to be cluttered with info I could view elsewhere on Yahoo if I so wish.

December 10th, 2008 at 11:16 am

Yahoo is a webmail, groups & search engine not a networking site you have created a product that has no interest to it’s press ganged users. Yahoo’s social & open policy is made up of coercion & lack of choice Yahoo should be ashamed you are behaving like the people the US is fighting a war against!

December 10th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

There are alot of negative reactions to this new “system”, so I thought I’d throw in that I’m looking forward to the new Yahoo, at least right now-it’s still Yahoo and not part of Microsoft, (as far as i know, correct me if i’m wrong!).

Back when we lost all communication from the Y360 team, I checked into what was in store for the community, and the concepts seem exciting. No more filling out a hundred different profiles all for the same account-that is annoying. I can have all my friends from different areas of Yahoo all in one place. I’ve been with Yahoo for a very long time and have yet to find any other website service that compares to what Yahoo offers. Perhaps I just have gotten so used to them that nothing else will do. I do know there’s nothing out there with the variety or the useability that they offer.

So, bring on the changes! It would be nice if it was sped up alittle though, I was looking forward to whatever new thing was going to replace Y360 at the end of this year.

December 10th, 2008 at 1:43 pm

Yahoo has censored 3 of my posts after they were posted. And I didn’t use swear words or slang. I wasn’t even aggressive. I was merely pointing out that yahoo censors certain words, which I then listed using the ! sign instead of certain letters. Like “se!ual” for the x in that word.

Yahoo I have reported you to the ACLU for violation of US internet legislation regarding censorship and the First Amendment.

December 10th, 2008 at 1:47 pm

This censorship is automated on profiles as well, which is why I post this complaint here. Test it yourselves. Try writing about the fa!cist movement in Italy for example. This entire political movement has been censored by Yahoo. So you can’t even call them fa!cists. Which they obviously are.

December 10th, 2008 at 1:48 pm

I hope people read my two posts above, before posts before they are removed by the yahoo gestapo.

December 10th, 2008 at 2:48 pm

Melissa,

Your post on Yahoo’s “Open and Social” policy and direction is welcomed. However, implementation of this policy and direction is not necessarily embraced by all. Many posts in Profile News lament the loss of alias profiles. Please reconsider your current implementation, many of us appear to want to have the features and functionality that previously existed reinstated.

December 10th, 2008 at 3:22 pm

Is ANYONE else having this issue:??

The feature on the old member/directory/profile gave you the option to hide or show online to other users. The “new” yahoo beta profile doesn’t have that option. I have gone back to my old yahoo member/directory/profile and tried MANY times to “uncheck” the feature to show online to other users! All it does when I uncheck the box and click finished editing is redirect me to my Yahoo beta profile.

When I go back and look at my old Yahoo member directory/profile the box has amazingly rechecked it’s self!! So, I had to create a NEW yahoo messenger ID..and the NEW one is not giving me the headaches that I have been having for over a week now with my old Yahoo messenger ID…I’m not talking about creating an alias either but a whole NEW yahoo messenger ID.

When I created the NEW yahoo messenger ID I DID NOT bother with the NEW beta profile!!

December 10th, 2008 at 7:16 pm

This new policy is still lame. If I want to let my “key” people know anything I just talk to them. I don’t need or want some stupid system that broadcasts my information to everybody on the internet. I don’t need to know what news my “key” people are reading or what music they are currently listening to or what websites they go to and think are cool anymore then others need to know that stuff about me. Of course this is all a moot point now, since most of my “key” people have stopped using yahoo.
I like the statement that this new system needs a lot of work still. I couldn’t agree more with that. Which goes back to other questions like, why did this thing get forced out before it was ready? Why didn’t yahoo take some time to do a true “beta” test? Why didn’t yahoo migrate profile information initially, instead of angering their users by “deleting” their old profiles first and then going back after many complaints and sort of re-populating the info.?

December 10th, 2008 at 7:38 pm

Since my new profile page looks so much like my old mash page, I’ve decided to use it that way. I’ll be posting video and such in my own comments, and others are welcome to do the same.

If yahoo doesn’t know what they’re doing, or is unable to give people what they want, then folks should go ahead and do what they want with yahoo.

p.s. Yahoo just laid off 10% of their staff, can anyone guess where this is all going?

December 10th, 2008 at 9:18 pm

I really hope they are not still blocking me because I’m so vocal about how bad this change has been.

Has anyone at yahoo noticed that we have not wanted this change? This is WORSE than facebook. If I want someone to know what site I have been on or know my opinion on something I’ll just tell them. These changes might be nice add-ons but to focus a system frequented by the ‘less social’ elements of the internet just seems counter intuitive. This is the exact kind of thing we have expected and we have been protesting against. If you gave us back the functionality of our OLD profiles and let us CHOOSE to have these extras It might have worked out but as it stands it is simply not an effective strategy.

December 10th, 2008 at 10:35 pm

It is clear to me that Yahoo still has a MAJOR communitcations problem. Your so called Open Strategy is still an abstract concept even after reading this article. We’ve been hearing about this profile ever since Matt Warburton informed us that you were closing 360. You create a sandbox called Mash for us to play around with and then you removed the sand. And now, you give us a new profile system with even less functionality than Mash.

Listen to what your users having been telling you. We want a blog. We want social network that works. We want a compelling reason to leave other websites such as Facebook or Myspace. So far, I see nothing that even remotely impresses me.

December 11th, 2008 at 9:39 am

“Yahoo’s CTO, Ari Balogh probably said it best: “This is about making Yahoo! social in every dimension. Social is not a destination — it’s a dimension and it will infuse all aspects of a consumer’s experience on the Web.””

Really? This is supposed to explain something? This is typical corporate hypespeak. It means NOTHING. Not one word tells the listener anything, and that’s your “best” explanation. Really?

Say it like this instead:

“Your activity on any Yahoo site will be logged and shared with all your connections. This data can also be shared with third parties. Several things happen here which are good for Yahoo. One, users learn about new Yahoo services driving traffic to those sites and features, exposing them to a wider audience. Secondly, by opening your data up to third parties, users habits and patterns can be made available to outside sources who will hopefully pay Yahoo some money to get more and better ads aimed at the user. Its great for yahoo! Meanwhile users can be more easily stalked by the myriad of crazy abusive types yahoo collects in its corners, and spammed at every turn by third party scammer sites and apps. We want to keep things as open as possible and so are building in absolutely no protection for users from abuse with this system. We also happened to do no market research with existing Yahoo users, and based this choice solely on envious glances at the traffic that facebook and myspace currently have. We hope to take the worst features of both sites and add them to Yahoo. Enjoy!”

Because that’s all I’m hearing right now. Anything else is lipstick on a stinky, stinky pig of an idea. Count me out, no matter how “good” you think it gets, I have no interest in this system.

December 11th, 2008 at 9:54 am

You remember yahoo Music? That was a GOOD way to market. I got to find out about new bands I actually liked, It rarely played crap I did not wnat once I marked enough ‘do not play’ boxes, it was free music even if I could not pick the songs and it didn’t feel like Yahoo was shoving me out in front of a line of corperate zombies to be eaten alive.

We are not that dumb. we know this is about Yahoo making money with marketing. What we are saying is “You did not fool us, now give us back Yahoo the way we want it and maybe ask us up front for the kidns of marketing we want to be a part of like adults.” To my knowledge none of us beleive in santa anymore or the tooth fairy or the easter bunny. Its not just dangerous and annoying, its a slap in the face to every adult who uses it. Melissa I really hope you will tell the people who developed this system that the smoke screen did not work and ask them to start working WITH us to make a yahoo we can enjoy and you guys can make money from. We wnat you to make money, we really do, but not if we are going to be insulted and abused to do it.

Now if I may make an analogy, the PS2. It is arguably the most popular gaming system of all time next to the SNES. Some would argue more popular. They are still making new PS2s long after the launch of the PS3 and it even gets new games. Do you know why? Backwards compatability. They didn’t ditch any of the things that they had before in order to give us something new. If I want to pop in Persona or Megaman legends 2 I pop in persona or megaman legends 2. if I want to play me a little summoner then it goes right in. No muss no fuss. I can HAVE the new if I want or I can have the old if I want.

You may not get as much per person with this new system if you let some people keep the old if they want it, but you will make far more overall because you won’t LOSE anyone. You only gain. If you give us back the main functionality of the OLD systems and then ADD IN the new stuff then you will stop losing people and more improtantly you will make more revinue off of the people who do choose to use your datamineing features. Its win win.

I know you guys are in dire straights there, but you have to know this could be so much easier on all of us if your development team would make concessions and give us the backwards compatability and old features we all want.

December 11th, 2008 at 10:08 am

“Social is not a destination — it’s a dimension…” sounds like typical Marketing BILGE.

by cynder66 — “I can have all my friends from different areas of Yahoo all in one place.”

I already HAD all my friends in one place. It’s called the Messenger Friends List.

And Mother Goose, it looks like mentioning fa5cists in Italy is acceptable on this blog. Just don’t dare criticize Ch1na!

December 11th, 2008 at 10:27 am

I just don’t like this new profile the old one was better with this one we don’t learn much about the people we want to talk and were they are from , yjis is my opinion Bye

December 11th, 2008 at 5:10 pm

That’s the issue here, you didn’t give yahoo users a choice. You placed this change upon us without warning, you all expect us to accept it just like that huh, If you really cared about the users of the yahoo network, then you’d bring back the old format or least put an opt-out. The only problem I had with the old format was the online status which yahoo ignored to fix. ..If you want to improve yahoo, then start off by getting rid of the porn bots in chatrooms not these new formatted profiles.

December 12th, 2008 at 1:26 am

Your ‘open and social’ has allowed people to put ’shows’ on their profile pages. Your guestbook feature is just what they needed. Those who go to any chat room know what I’m talking about.. Nice going Yahoo. You censor our words but these people have been allowed to do whatever on thier pages.
At the very least…censorship is anti-American. (…and yes I know you have users from allover but treating us like you do the Chinese isn’t going to do you any good over here and WE know how to bite back)
Shame on you Yahoo…SHAME SHAME SHAME.
I’m off to Multiply…

December 12th, 2008 at 3:56 am

This strategy is so stupid. You are just inviting use of other services which will eventuality have your customer sue that service instead. Something similar was tried before by aol and where are they now?

December 12th, 2008 at 10:06 am

New?
It’s a flashy neon pain job on a broken down wreck.
Stupid.
‘Nuff said.

December 12th, 2008 at 3:43 pm

I have one other thought to add about this process, and maybe I’m talking on the wrong forum here.

Who here uses Yahoo Groups?
Who here has heard of Grouply?
Grouply was a third party service that allowed users a shiney new interface for their yahoo groups use, and it even worked for MSN groups too, iirc.

Problem is, very few liked it. Many groups banned Grouply and rightly or wrongly considered it invasive of the privacy of their groups. Were it a successfully viral product we all would be there right now, basking in it stalky goodness.

We ain’t. Sorry Grouply. Some may like ya, but many don’t. I’ve been on your service, and your e-mail updates before, and I can see why.

Maybe, just maybe, adding social networking to all aspects of Yahoo should have been investigated even somewhat before being decided on as a goal. Just sayin’ the metrics already existed for at least one product, without Yahoo even needing to do the work.

December 12th, 2008 at 4:08 pm

SUGGESTION:

Contacts>Categories:

What the heck? I can’t create a contact category with spaces or special characters in it? What the hell kind of buggy limitation is that? This thing is SO not ready to have been a replacement product its ridiculous! What were you smoking? It can’t *do* eenything!

December 12th, 2008 at 4:56 pm

the changes made to profiles make it seem like yahoo did not even consider chat rooms as part of their new “open and social” platform.
this is amazing because the yahoo chat rooms are the best place for a user to be “open and social”

could you please answer the following questions related to yahoo chat rooms…

1. how does one change the nickname yahoo shows in a yahoo chat room? changing the name on the old profiles used to do it. but now there is nothing like this anymore.

2. how does one search profiles for other yahoo users by age, location, marital status, or interests? there is nothing like this anymore.

3. why are yahoo chat rooms being ignored in these new changes? does yahoo plan to phase chat rooms out completely?

December 12th, 2008 at 7:43 pm

u know i thought it was just my pc, cos i didnt think yahoo had the right to take down my old profile, that i had info on myself, a pic, a link to myspace, n 360. now its gone, n im pissed. what ever happen to copywrite? this sucks, it seriouslly does, u got ur terms, of service well what bout ours? this new versions sucks

December 12th, 2008 at 8:09 pm

I don’t get how yahoo profiles are the hub of anything. I’ve filled out my profile completely, and I don’t see anything on my profile pointing to other parts of yahoo. Are these connections coming later? Or are they here now? Are they behind some sort of secret door?

December 12th, 2008 at 10:00 pm

Can I keep my profile privet? I mean, I don’t want to meet the wrong people. I just want to chat with my friends.

December 12th, 2008 at 11:40 pm

Melissa, I know this is probably the wrong place to put it but the link http://p1.pf.re4.yahoo.com/(your that once allowed us to look at our old profiles no longer works properly. This was the last chance many of us had to use the old profiles to help make things kind of work even if we could not edit them. Is there a new link to look at the old profiles? I’m sorry but I have no idea where this should go and I am tired. It should show though that people are willing to go to lengths to avoid this new profile system

December 13th, 2008 at 6:59 am

I don’t like the new profile system. I have so many friends on my buddy list that I am now unable to view the profiles of. I have almost all of my buddy list on my Yahoo 360 and now some have done the new profile and some haven’t. You should’ve tied in the new profiles with our old ones to where we don’t have to take the time to add the people we already have added to our lists. The new profiles are ok, just don’t think we ought to have to readd people we already have on our friends list aand y360 that is what sucks

December 13th, 2008 at 7:14 am

Hi,

On the old profiles you were able to see if your friends were online, if they chose to let you know that. In the new one, you can’t enable this at all. I sure do miss that feature. Also, on the old profiles, you were able to see when a chatter joined Yahoo Chat. I found it helpful in talking with a chatter. In the new profiles, we don’t know when this chatter joined Yahoo Chat, and I find myself having to ask the chatter if they are new, or have they been around for a while? Just my opinion. I have been around in chat for 10 years, and liked alot of the old features in Profiles. Change is good but why weren’t we asked what we liked or disliked about the Profiles and other features of Yahoo Chat before your staff started making changes?

December 13th, 2008 at 1:40 pm

Social networking? How is this social networking when our online smilies are gone and we don’t know if certain people are online???

Did Yahoo even consider how easy they are making things for online stalkers? That online smiley let users know if certain crazy people were online and gave the user the opportunity to either use another alias or avoid chatrooms altogether. Thanks for keeping us safe, Yahoo!!

If social networking is what they are after, I would have rather seen Yahoo focus on 360 than on this stupid profile system. At least that was functional; this is just crap plain and simple

December 13th, 2008 at 2:31 pm

I am doing a PhD so I am used to reading and analysing documents.
This blog is total nonesense, pure sales speak and it conveys no useful information at all.
Can you please explain in real English the concept you are trying to sell to Yahoo users? Would it have not been a good idea to find out what your customers wanted before embarking upon this project?

I love the ’share your ideas’ link on my new super duper profile it is a shame that like most things on Yahoo these days it does not work.

Just a little request could Yahoo please sort out the spammers, scrollers and cyber bullies that we keep reporting but your customer care section seems unable to deal with?
Yahoo customer care is a joke. I would suggest that sorting out them would be a far more useful project than the one you are embarking on now Melissa.

December 13th, 2008 at 6:11 pm

Yahoo is indexing microformats.

http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/06/monkey_microformat.html

Host a blog for each user on Yahoo and embed a microformat on the home page with name, gender, age, location, interests, books, movies, music, etc.

The blog could be a Wordpress blog or any of the other free blog software available. There is a multi-user version of Wordpress.

Wordpress has a lot of free templates so it is easy to change the look of a blog.

Wordpress has an Akismet.com plugin for filtering out spam. You could write a plugin for your SpamGuard service.

You could write a plugin for a “friends” list. You already have one for MyBlogLog.

You could write a plugin to display the comments on the “guestbook” blog entry.

Yahoo search engine indexes all the Yahoo blogs/profiles for each user including the microformat on the home page of each blog/profile.

Provide a custom search page for Yahoo blogs/profiles to make it easy to search on name, gender, age, location, etc. contained in the microformat.

Done.

December 14th, 2008 at 8:05 am

Face it folks, Yahoo is dying, the company continues to make bad decisions that drive customers away and they refuse to fire the people responsible for these decisions. They are on the fast track to being a former great, another AOL, (anyone remember them?). It’s time to migrate ourselves to other services and leave this stinking, dying, carcass that used to be Yahoo behind.

December 14th, 2008 at 4:22 pm

I was wondering why aliases (public profiles) do not link to your overall profile. You can’t edit them either by going to http://manage.members.yahoo.com/index_listprofiles.html because it brings up a page that says: “We’ve launched a new profile on Yahoo!. The user you are searching for either does not exist, or has chosen to keep their profile private.”
This is very frustrating to me. Should I delete my “aliases” (public profiles)? If I do, will I still be a member of the groups I’ve joined that have my public profiles there?
Any one who may be able to help me out, please let me know.
Thanks

December 15th, 2008 at 2:55 am

Why not add a “preference/option” to give users the choice to use the “new beta profile” or the “old profile” then maybe so many people wouldn’t be leaving Yahoo? A choice..it’s as simple as that!

December 15th, 2008 at 11:26 am

I have been a member of yahoo since 2oo1. I choose yahoo because of the way they did there profile and the privacy they allowed, also back then I was able to put animated pictures on my profile ,which by the way NO other site would let you do at the time. Plus the fact at the time Yahoo was VERY popular because of there all around format and the way they conducted there site…But over time yahoo has changed so much everytime I turn around there so call new and improved way of doing things has become a thorn in my side as it has everyone I have talked to WE all agree that Yahoo has gone to far with there profiles and improving things, every time WE turn around there is a new and improved this OR that! Now Yahoo wants to get MORE “” OPEN AND SOCIAL”" and at the same time again change Everyones profile to suit there self… The main reason most of US has choosen yahoo over everyone else in there first place was thier stand alone way of doing things…Plus the way they formated there profile back then…….Well YAHOO has changed so much that its time to say “Good Bye” to yahoo… Yahoo has became a thorn in alot of pppls side with there constant “NEW AND IMPROVED”…. .. There for “I and ALOT of ppl” has agreed to IMPROVE our self and save our self Alot of Frustation and IMPROVE our self and say “Good Bye” and move on to another messenger service besides Yahoo….It has became nothing less than a headack trying to keep up with yahoo changes I am a person that does not need constant improving without choose !!

December 15th, 2008 at 11:49 am

Are you going to merge the MyBlogLog accounts with the new Yahoo profiles?

Having two sets of friends/connections on Yahoo seems disconnected.

December 15th, 2008 at 2:28 pm

I don’t want anything to do with this “open and social” non-sense. Why did you force this on us?

December 15th, 2008 at 4:40 pm

HERE’S YOUR FIX

for this boondoggle.

Now that you have the new tech under the hood, give people an option to switch to a ’simple’ version, and make that ’simple’ version look and work JUST LIKE the old version. No connections, no stalking, no malarky. Then watch the metrics see who chooses what. Sort of a way to have a Profile or a Low Profile. As they like.

December 15th, 2008 at 8:20 pm

Well, I just want to say Yahoo! must have missed a few lessens in business class. It kinda works like this, what people want is what sells.

For those that missed the lesson, if you don’t give the people what they won’t, they won’t use your services. Therefore, you will have nobody wanting their advertisements on your page seeing as they would be getting hardly any revenue.

But instead of actually listening to your customers, you think you need to try to be like some other company that has users. Well, let’s not forget now that myspace has a pretty damn decent search, you can actually search for members. You don’t even have one now, other than your 360 pages where you can search, but can’t even search for last login to avoid searching through pages of profiles where the case is the user hasn’t used it in years.

If you want to fix something, fix your chat, it would take less than a day of programming. The bots did not get by captcha, the humans that logged them in did however though.

Simply do this, have it set up so that when an annoying user, or spam bot gets ignored by a handfull of other users in a chat room the user gets kicked from that room. If it’s a bot it would not be able to log back in, or even into a different room. So it would require a human to sit at a computer desk all day, to relog the bot into your server and a different room, just to get kicked out again in a moments time. Do you catch my drift here. You would see a drastic decrease in the bots in rooms, users would start to actually use them again. Users would not have the same problems trying to log into chat.

And problem solved, you get more more users once they realized you have done something and maybe they’ll sign up to your 360 and create a regular profile on yahoo. But you still need to improve your search on 360 and bring it back on the member directory.

You get more users, people will start to want to put their ads on your site. Hope you enjoyed your business lesson, and the lesson I gave on fixing your chat rooms, which would take less than a day of programming(well for me anyways), to accomplish.

December 15th, 2008 at 8:33 pm

Melissa let me ask you a question. Do the people above you actually know what we are all posting in here, if not maybe you should let them know we are all pissed.

December 16th, 2008 at 8:47 am

Does anyone here know how to get rid of this “profile” thing? I hate it. Right now in my profile I have first name: none of, and last name: your business.

I am a private person, and I want that to be respected.

December 16th, 2008 at 11:22 am

I agree with most of the people that have commented here. I want my alias profiles back, please. I don’t like my “updates” being broadcast to everyone. I did, however, figure out that I could block my online appearance through my Messenger. It’s in the preference section.
I don’t care for the new version of Messenger, but what really riles me up is that I am unable to look at the profiles that I spent so much time on. I never got into the 360…I made one and didn’t like it and did my darndest to avoid using it. I use Yahoo for my messaging, I don’t need another social network. My social network is the chatroom, which Yahoo seems to be bent on destroying. Not to bring up an old nut, but I miss the user chatrooms. I adjusted to that when I found where everyone went that I talked to on a regular basis.
In general…what I’m trying to say…I don’t like this so-called “beta” and I want my old profiles back.

December 16th, 2008 at 7:22 pm

Melissa, it would be nice to hear from you and for you to let us know that Yahoo! is hearing our complaints. Whether or not they give a crap it would be nice to know that they are seeing all of this, are you relaying the message. Yahoo! is committing suicide. Oh, and when you come back to let us know, don’t do it in here, we will all be in the help section of your wonderful Yahoo! Chat, which is full of chatters. We will be glad to all PM you at once as soon as you log into the room, after you attempt to for 2 or 3 times, maybe less, depending if you get a decent set of CAPTCHA codes you can actually get right the first time. Also to, don’t get offended if we all tell you we are getting naked on cam in those PMs. We kinda think you are hot. We will tell you just how happy we all are with our new profiles. You can come see are new profiles now just click your this link to take your browser to freecamsluts dot com , hornymilfs dot com , freakcamshows dot com. We are all getting naked now as we speak.

December 16th, 2008 at 8:21 pm

To all users that are upset like me over the Send IM link no longer being in your profiles. The do allow a little html in the profiles in the guestbook section here. So I did some testing and it won’t allow you to use the ymsgr:sendIM? but does allow you to put your status I found. So what I did was put the code in to show my status and along with my id so users will know when I’m online and be able to copy and paste my id. Here is the code, if it won’t let it appear I’ll repose with a bunch of spaces between things.

My Status: My ID: yourID

You may view my profile here to see how it looks http://profiles.yahoo.com/chtwright

There is still a way you can get the actual link on there however if you want to, if you have a personal webpage, create a file called and name it something like sendim.html, use meta refresh in it to redirect to ymsgr:sendIM?yourID and you are set to go, I just don’t like it cause it also has to open up another page. If you don’t know how to use meta refresh in html look it up on google or something.

December 17th, 2008 at 6:06 am

I can see why Yahoo!’s stock is imitating a rock dropped off a cliff…. and why the CEO was removed! How many people used Yahoo forums and anonymous aliases to talk about things they didn’t want identified to them? That ability is gone for new people.

December 17th, 2008 at 12:20 pm

I want my email for EMAIL, my INSTANT MESSENGER for chat, my old member/directory BACK !! I HATE this NEW beta profile!!! If I wanted to “connect” with friends I would have kept up with 360..then again I CAN connect with friends via INSTANT MESSENGER!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This whole beta profile was such a WASTE of man power! I had to create a new instant messenger BECAUSE my original one had a “setting” that SOMEHOW changed in the old basic/member directory that I CAN NOT FIX and I CAN’T get any REAL ANSWER for why????

December 17th, 2008 at 2:05 pm

This will fail, in fact it has already failed, no matter what you say or claim. The whole idea is so stupid, “obviously” stupid and I wonder how come you don’t get it.

btw, better be a bit “open and social” and try to respond to your customers complaints.

December 17th, 2008 at 2:07 pm

These changes and the loss of anonimity is one of the reasons I now use pogo for my games and other sites for other stuff. This was not a good idea that yahoo had, unless we asuser are given the option to opt-out of this stuff. This could also be a reason as to why yahoo stoock is down i think. where is the customer service?????

December 17th, 2008 at 11:26 pm

Yahoom you’ve got a good idea, it would be very help full to me if i get the answer from you. Let me know how is it. thanks

December 17th, 2008 at 11:27 pm

thanks for web

December 18th, 2008 at 5:34 am

I like the Concept or better the Idea. Social to me means to interact with others by conversations of endless topics here at Yahoo! I enjoy Yahoo very much.
Open and Social to me is what we are doing now. Isn’t? Please don’t misunderstand me on what I am trying to say. How different will it be from blogging, emailing, IM, voice and web cams?

December 18th, 2008 at 3:01 pm

I click my inbox and all I get is loading…
If it ain’t broke,don’t fix it.

December 19th, 2008 at 12:10 pm

Has anyone noticed that Melissa or anyone else on the Yahoo staff has not been responding to posts??? I guess yahoo just doesn’t care so maybe we should all start using MySpace or some other site. At least a MySpace profile is fairly easy to set up, unlike the new and (un)improved Yahoo one. MySpace also includes that online smiley so many of us would like to see back. I have never been too happy with MySpace, Fubar, or any of the rest, however, at this point Yahoo is not any better, so I might as well give it a try

December 19th, 2008 at 6:18 pm

I get so many different people that ask to be added to my im list that I get confused. I think that when they ask…they should have to list where they found your email name at. I get a lot of people that play on the same leagues on that I do. I want to know where they get my name from/ Is there a way to find out other than ask them?

December 19th, 2008 at 8:27 pm

Ok so this is supposed to encourage open and social networking. Have you noticed how many people now have not bothered to put anything into their profiles? I would say it is now closed and unsociable – which is what is was before, in a much better format. Bring back the old profiles, this is not working

December 20th, 2008 at 11:56 am

Seems to me it is time to sink Yahoo. They are increasingly taking away the privacy of users. People can see when your on line, you have to post information about yourself. What is this? Yahoo has become the current Gestapo or KGB. No doubt they’ll turn information on Chinese citizens over to the government. We need laws forbidding this sort of activity NOW!!!!!

December 20th, 2008 at 12:03 pm

Anyone that won’t their status back on their profile put this code in your guest book section. Make sure the guest book is set to be viewed by anyone if you wish. Change ( to . Make sure you substitute yourid with your yahoo id. You can see an example of the code at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chtwright Here it is

(p)My Status: (img border=0 src=”http://opi.yahoo.com/online?u=YOURID&m=g&t=1″)(br)My ID: (b)YOURID(/b)(/p)

Hope that helps. Users won’t be able to click to send you an IM but they will know your status and can copy your id into yahoo messenger. Already tried to put the link in guestbook it won’t let you.

December 20th, 2008 at 12:06 pm

Anyone that won’t their status back on their profile put this code in your guest book section. Make sure the guest book is set to be viewed by anyone if you wish. Change ( to . Also change ‘ to “Make sure you substitute yourid with your yahoo id. You can see an example of the code at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chtwright Here it is

(p)My Status: (img border=0 src=’http://opi.yahoo.com/online?u=YOURID&m=g&t=1′)(br)My ID: (b)YOURID(/b)(/p)

Hope that helps. Users won’t be able to click to send you an IM but they will know your status and can copy your id into yahoo messenger. Already tried to put the link in guestbook it won’t let you.

December 20th, 2008 at 12:25 pm

It appears that yahoo doesn’t know a damn thing about open source innovation. The first and primary point of any open source innovation is to listen to the customer. In yahoo’s case they have conflated customer with advertisers rather than with users. I think they just shot themselves in the head. Not even Microsoft is that dumb.

December 20th, 2008 at 12:34 pm

For those of you who want their status on their page. The new profiles do not allow the link to send IM but does allow the for you to display your status using Guestbook. You can look at my profile at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chtwright. You will see my status in my Guestbook and the code for it beside my pic. I couldn’t get the whole code cause the space wouldn’t allow for it if you want it exactly like mine you can send me email and I’ll try to get it to you as soon as possible

December 21st, 2008 at 3:56 am

SO. A year and a bit after you announced 360 would be unmaintained to make way for ‘the new way’, you finally announce exactly what this new social platform is. If you’re short of programmers perhaps you should look into hiring the Duke Nukem Forever team?

It’s hilarious how you claim to be becoming more open and social, when the evidence states quite the contrary. You have killed off your two most usable social websites – 360 and profiles, then you replaced profiles with an absolutely broken social networking site that does barely anything. It DOES allow you to add people but that’s it. Now, I’m not asking for Facebook/MySpace style feature bloat but one would think that something fairly fundamental to a social networking site is the ability to FIND and SPEAK TO other people. But hey if Yahoo thinks that I want three people on my friends list with whom I have no way easy of communicating then who am I to tell them otherwise. The developer is always right.

December 21st, 2008 at 6:39 pm

it would really be nice if Yahoo did something about cloners, booters, and botters…..I bet this would go over very well in the Yahoo community

December 21st, 2008 at 8:08 pm

Too bad about the profiles, I don’t use any of the other “services” yahoo offers, there are plenty of other social networks to use.

December 21st, 2008 at 8:29 pm

lol @ mister! This is an impromptu ongoing rant about yahell!

The good news folks; I just got the upgrade to my yahoo mail. It seems to be working. I see my connections ( not contacts ) in a side-bar. fwiw

I also see the suggested list like the one profile. It’s not as developed as 360, but what the heck…

Merry Christmas…Happy New Year…

December 22nd, 2008 at 6:48 am

Yahoo, your design choices are just plain BUTT ugly. Your new profile is bland and unnatractive to say the least.

December 22nd, 2008 at 7:33 am

have to go back to my hot mail account. this sucks, everything in your in box can be seen by evryone. especially stalkers. look at the 9 yr old kid on here. who are these people you want me to respond to? i dont have time to talk to all of them. if i wanted to talk to them i would pick up the phone. how dare you put private e-mail out for everyone to see it? put me back on the original plan please, and delete this foolish program for 9 yr olds..dale.

December 22nd, 2008 at 10:38 am

Have 2 problems, I don’t want the connections suggestions. I have people I IM and people I don’t and the 2 lists are usually separate. If I want someone on connections I will add them, if not, I won’t simple as that. All this does is open me up to more spammers, botters and the like. I am sick and tired of seeing my yahoo account getting used by spammer, who got it off of here. Is there anyway you will actually do some thing about them (that was the other)? I have notified you of these usages in the past and here I am seeing it again.

December 22nd, 2008 at 2:34 pm

I am a paid Yahoo Mail Plus user, I have been with Yahoo for a long time. I am sorry to say that I disliked this new beta module format and planning on using my Gmail account. I like simplicity. Every time Yahoo changes something, I for example, have to contend with bugs for six months. My Y! e-mail changed his 2008 early summer — supposedly for better Yahoo — mine finally got the bugs out November 27 this year, then it was great. Now, what are they trying to do to me again? If they don’t change it back soon, I’m going to asked for a refund. If there is a way out of this, I would like to know what it is. Russ

December 23rd, 2008 at 2:38 pm

I think Yahoo! should get clear glass bathroom stall doors for all of their employees and tell Melissa it’s part of their plan to be more “Open and Social.” And I’d love to see what her reaction would be when she says she wants the old doors back and they tell her that they have no plans on bringing back the old doors they were outdated but they will be looking at incorporating a feature of the old doors, they are looking into bringing the door locks back. Just be patient.

December 24th, 2008 at 1:26 pm

Guess what folks, this site is the old mash site. Look around, did you notice how the comments are posted both on your profile, and the other person’s profile?

Ha Ha ha….mash is back. I want plugins!

December 24th, 2008 at 10:06 pm

Uh, why is it that I still get this message on two of my accounts..Your profile was deactivated by an administrator. Please fix that. Not everyone has access to profile esp if they are receiving that message.

December 25th, 2008 at 7:56 pm

I think this new yahoo profile setup is horrible, They should have given us the choice if we wanted to use it or not. The whole connection thing is the worst part, most of the connections i made are people in my messenger list, yet half of the connections it didn’t link there messenger id with the connections profile. I also hate how you have to already know the name or email of a person you want to add, you cant search for people you don’t already know. They say there trying to make it more open and social, ya right!!! The only people i can be social with are people i already know, there making it even harder to expand your social network, not easier. At least bring back the member search directory. Hell i say bring back the old profiles, there were nothing wrong with how they were set up, all they needed to do was fix some bugs.

December 26th, 2008 at 2:27 pm

I am finding this whole fiasco of an unannounced forced roll-out of a defective beta ’social system’ and yahoo’s arrogant and condescending lack of response amazing. Amazing in how it just gets worse. I note now the moderators of this blog have stopped even pretending to care 90% of the posters are angry and hate this new thing, and just babble along about some new ‘improvement’ they made ‘just for us’. Melissa has even stopped responding to the few posts that seem approving of this garbage of a beta replacement. Although I cancelled my Yahoo accounts weeks ago over this, it’s like a car wreck on the side of the road, I can’t stop looking at it lol.

December 26th, 2008 at 8:07 pm

dgdggfg

December 27th, 2008 at 12:10 pm

yes more social, the NEW & IMPROVED Yahoo??? The Damn Bots are still at it, and the MORONS are too !!! YAHOO doesnt care either!!

bill t

December 28th, 2008 at 10:07 am

WATS UP PEOPLE I LOVE YAHOO IT ROCKS I JUST LOVE IT AND IT DOSE NOT HAVE NO PROBLEMS AT ALL I JUST LOVE IT A LOT SO ANYBODY HAVE ANY PROBLEMS ON YAHOO TYPE 5567 IF U HAVE PROBLEMS ON YAHOO CHOW BUY THE WAY IM 7

December 28th, 2008 at 4:02 pm

Once you gow down the road of censorship where does it end?
Do you censor my articles that might upset the scientific paradigm?
Do you censor any mention of God?
Do you censor any derogatory comments about religion or science in general or do you only censor comments about Muslims?
Everyone has different opions about what is tasteful and what is not.
How do you keep a happy medium without deleting important information that if released could create a better world?
Maybe Yahoo’s censorship has already doomed us to a future of endless war. Are we to remain planet bound forever?
The only constructive advice I can contribute to this forum is, ‘try to use common sense.”

December 28th, 2008 at 4:33 pm

Time to restore our old profiles and throw this junk system away.

December 28th, 2008 at 4:35 pm

Time to restore our old profiles and throw this junk system away. ASAP

December 29th, 2008 at 1:36 pm

OMG.. Yahoo is awful!! Common Sense says it all!

December 29th, 2008 at 1:37 pm

http://search.aim.com/apsearchus/search

December 29th, 2008 at 1:55 pm

Funny how they don’t censor your private information, but will censor your comments. The “new and improved” profiles do suck. They are harmful to the users and do not contribute to anything to improvement. If we wanted to be in a social network, we would have used MySpace or Facebook. But we are here to chat in a chatroom. That’s all we want. Plain and simple. And to those who tout that this is a “free” site, believe me, they are making plenty off of this to keep it going and to keep upgrading it. We pay for it in other ways. The focus needs to be fixing the real problems, which concern the bots and the connections. Quit limiting what the users can do by changing the formats and eliminating rooms. It is difficult enough to get into the rooms that you want to because they are filled with so many bots. It won’t be long before someone brings about a lawsuit against Yahoo because of them, since they promote porn to the underage users. One click and you’re whisked away to the land of porn!

December 30th, 2008 at 12:19 am

Melissa, if you are still there can you please tell us if the lack of feedback here is due to an acceptance that the current direction will not work or is it simply that the negative feedback is so overwhelming that its better to ignore it so your company can continue on their path? It won’t work, at all. This attempt to make yahoo more ‘open and social’ is something none of us want. we have said that often enough. The company needs to accept that the customers do NOT want your idea of social. We want the old profile system back.

December 30th, 2008 at 5:50 am

The lack of feedback would be yahoo’s standard practice of not keeping the users informed of any changes that may be in the works. I doubt that yahoo’s position will change on this issue, they pretty much have a “trench” mentality when it comes to their “improvements”. The best we can hope for is that they meet users halfway and reset the new profile system to look like the old and make all the “social” shi……ummm, stuff, optional plugins. Hopefully they will make the “social” stuff optional across all of their services.

December 31st, 2008 at 10:01 am

I have been a user of yahoo since 1999. Does anyone remember the clubs that got replaced by the groups format.? Membership was approved based on a common bond and what was on your profile. We were a huge group of Military Brats that were stationed nd attended DOD schools overseas as far back as the 50’s. Yahoo allowed us to reconnect, find long lost friends, make new ones all over the world. We had a chatroom in the club that was usually full even when regularly scheduled chats weren’t on. Several even found lost loves and old friends. I met two that I was playmates with 40 years prior at an air force base in Montana, who ended up in Germay at a different base, and we still, 7 years later connect via IM and email. Your profile had to contain the school, your grad year and/or years you attended. We had moderators that kept the spammers and those that had nothing to do with the schools. We lost the owner of one club and had to shut it down due to spammers and spyware sharers..
So we resorted to IM. Another site was opened with strict controls and no one that did not have required information on their profile was asked to fix, and if they did not they were not approved.
Then one day we went to the club for a regularly scheduled chat and the room was gone. The club was now an e-group. Yahoo did not listen to us then….So we resorted to IM. On 9/11 there were up to 65 people in and out of our conference. Some had friends/family in the towers and at the pentagon. The support and connection was incredible. People found us based what was on our profiles. Finding other Brats lead us to have real life reunions all over the contry and stay connected via Yahoo. Soon however Yahoo became Yahell. This new format suxs. I still moderate a group and when I first saw the new profiles, what a huge let down…made it more difficult to know if the person attended our school. Only information was on the request to join, but is not seen by anyone but me. We have lost a tool that brought so many people back together. I tried years ago and had copious disscusion with yahoo customer service. I will say they did respond and even fixed a thing or two pointed out to them. But it is so obvious now that they are not listening. Beta is supposed to be a test, test is not working go back to the old format.
Everytime Yahoo has new and improved something it has ruined the one reason we used it. In light of what others posted I will not upgrade my messenger until I am forced to and I am going to pay more attention to my email. I just check mail and read the news, and havent looked at what else is there. I will admit I have been using gmail and chat there more and more….
They have lost a huge group of people.

December 31st, 2008 at 5:08 pm

I notice they have stopped replying. So just maybe with hope. They’ll bring back the old format. We don’t want a social network, we want yahoo. No more changes. The old format just needed to be fixed like the online status within the profiles, which was ignored for so many months. You can just fix up the old formated profiles instead of this new profile junk. If we wanted a social network, then we go to myspace or facebook. Now show some concern, seriously.

January 1st, 2009 at 3:00 pm

Dream on, shortone. They’ve stopped replying because they’re on holiday hiatus. When they return, any replies will be more of the same how-to’s for this farcical profile system and more of the Open and Social mantra.

“The old profiles system was outdated and not ready to support the capabilities required of a modern social site.” Well guess what? The New System isn’t ready either!

January 1st, 2009 at 5:41 pm

Yahoo!’s new profiles are sick, ugly and totally unwanted. Stop telling us what to do! Go back to the old. Or I’m through with Yahoo! There are many good places that would take my business and me as me.

January 1st, 2009 at 9:20 pm

Yahoo is guilty of criminal behavior! Putting our real names out there in the profiles when we don’t want them seen puts us at risk from scammers, spammers and worse. My Congressmen and Senators will hear of this outrage … and my lawyers. Take my real name off immediately!!!

January 2nd, 2009 at 6:26 am

if it works don`t fix it

January 3rd, 2009 at 7:49 am

We need to know why our old profiles haven’t been restored yet. It should not take this long to restore them. We are being jerked around.

January 4th, 2009 at 5:50 am

I don’t like the invitation for the connections, First off you have put a connection on there, whom I don’t know and every time I remove it it comes b ack even though it says it won’t. I have tried everyway to get this off, and it is really bugging me.

January 4th, 2009 at 6:13 am

I don’t carwe WHAT your strategy is, Melissa. My Yahoo profile still reads: “Your profile was deactivated by an administrator.” and I haven’t been able to re-create it since you guys tampered with the conversion.

I would like this FIXED!!!!

January 4th, 2009 at 8:15 am

Your service is no longer of any use to me. I must have more control of who sees what with my profle. I do not wish to identify, or specificly link to/with too many others. I needt to continue being able to review individual profiles before I can consider if I wish to dialogue with them. It seems that you have taken a great facility and all but ruined it. If things do not improve, and soon, you will lose me as a Yahoo customer.

January 4th, 2009 at 10:23 am

social WHAT??.. jeeeze… the same old crap that Companies trot out to their employees. ‘D’oh.. thank you..yes sir,no sir,, treat me as a moron sir..( that;s irony btw -or is it sarcasm?) .

. “Yahoo’s CTO, Ari Balogh probably said it best: “This is about making Yahoo! social in every dimension. Social is not a destination — it’s a dimension and it will infuse all aspects of a consumer’s experience on the Web.”..

CONCENTRATE Onwaht consumers want ?? umm try NO BOTS!!…

Who the hell sorts priorities?

January 5th, 2009 at 7:02 am

Sorry Melissa, I am sure it isn’t your fault. But you “failed” We already have myspace and facebook. There were some nice things about yahoo messenger, being able to find people by location or subject and chat with them… For a long time searching members didn’t work, with no word from yahoo, that tells us you didn’t care. (Not you, but your overlords) I kept my old profile, I didn;t like 360. Now you are running behind the leaders and ignoring the people that made yahoo work in the first place.
Here is all I want, a simple profile and be able to search for people in my area code/zip code and by interest. You are trying to play catchup with facebook and myspace. If I were you I would be looking for a new job because you are ‘fail’ing.

January 5th, 2009 at 12:33 pm

Yahoo,
You have really ruined chat. You no longer give us the option to view someone’s profile before we decide to chat to them. Was it your intention to destroy chat in favor of the more “open and social” format? If so, you have succeeded.

January 5th, 2009 at 8:58 pm

I find this absolutlely hilarious in some sick way. Here we are complaining. To whom? Each other? for what purpose? Venting? Yahoo doesn’t give a hoot. They have demonstrated that so many times it is mind boggling. Yet here we are begging, pleading, falling on our very knees in some desperate attempt to get this doomed corporation to listen to us when they have so clearly demonstrated that they are not listening at all. Why are we wasting time with this blog? And why, prey tell, are we wasting our time with yahoo. Once they offered something unique. Now they offer nothing that someone else isn’t doing far better. And this is a corporate strategy? Adios. Add my name to the long list of those loyal users of MANY years you have driven away in frank disgust. I hope you find some new ones to replace us. And I am sure you will in the form of more bots and spammers. Let me know. I will be elsewhere. Bye.

January 6th, 2009 at 11:49 am

I went to myspace ecause that’s where my kids are. I still go back to 360 as it was my very first profile page and I miss those friends that i made there. As soon as there was mention of 360 closing, people started leaving. I kept hanging out hoping things would get better. When will you do something…………..I’m losing all my friends

January 7th, 2009 at 4:57 am

Wow…just about 1 month since Melissa last posted. I think she got fired for not convincing Yahoo users that this new profile system is just amazing. The new profiles may have been nice if they were as simple as the old ones. No one wants to take the time to go through 40 steps to set up a profile. Unfortunately no one at Yahoo cares what we as users think because if they did we would have our old profiles back, or at least something close to what we had. Thanks Yahoo…for ignoring our wants.

January 9th, 2009 at 9:52 am

Personally, the old profiles were fine. I CONTROLLED what people saw or didn’t see. It should be up to the individual what information is given or not given. Your system is NOT HACK proof. You didn’t protect your subscribers prior to now and I have NO REASON to believe that you will start now.

January 10th, 2009 at 10:08 am

Yahoo and all it’s products is a messy, scattered piece of sh!t. They need to do an overhaul and figure how to get these things together.

January 10th, 2009 at 2:27 pm

It’s SO much fun reading news about the “new profile” when one’s been greeted by “Sorry, this profile cannot be retrieved at the moment. Please try again.” when trying to view/edit/do anything with it and promised by “Customer Care” that it’s a known bug that’ll be fixed momentarily pretty much ever since its implementation. *groan*

January 10th, 2009 at 9:43 pm

One day I started to get “connection suggestions” of complete strangers who I never email on my yahoo mail main page. Upon finding more info, what little there is, it is stated that the “connection suggestions” are determined from people I “frequently” email, which is not true. That leads me to think my information is being sent to strangers and spammers as well. Rather than more “social” this is making using yahoo mail more anti-social. You shouldn’t implement things on existing users like that. If I want to be social, I’ll go to a social networking site. If yahoo wants to be a social networking site, yahoo should construct a separate site and invite users to that site.

January 11th, 2009 at 1:59 pm

I LIKE blogging. There is NO blog module.

I LIKE the background options. There is NO background options!

What good is this NEW place if it doesn’t suit the needs of the people who were all HAPPY with the old 360 pages just the way they were?

January 12th, 2009 at 5:16 pm

I hate the new profile and refuse to use it…too ugly and stupid to fill out or post a picture…like Sarah said above, if it wasn’t broken why get in there and mess with it? Yahoo has been crazy lately…my 360 page ate my blogs, I cannot post new blogs and my comments lock up…the IM also is crazy…take so many tries to log onto it.

January 12th, 2009 at 7:05 pm

You know it would have been a brilliant idea if they had chosen to keep it away from the aspects of Yahoo that were already working properly. As it stands now the worry is that the user will lose total control of privacy in favor of adding more third party bloat ware. Already I have gotten people I don’t want pestering me for connections, and I can’t shut it off.

The more I find out the more I think Yahoo had a spark of a good idea at one point, but at this point the number of people who simply cannot abide the horrible execution could be the death of it. The designers need to give us back the simple base functionality and then go back to working on making the more complex aspects optional.

January 12th, 2009 at 9:04 pm

What is the point of these new profiles? It tells me I have over 300 contacts, but doesnt list any of them. But wouldnt that just be a repeat of what my IM list does? Yeah it would. What about a search to find people interested in the same things you are? Nope no search. And nothing has been added for a month. MSN is looking better all the time.

January 13th, 2009 at 1:45 pm

I was just wondering if maybe you could make it to where you could add some “you” into your profile with backgrounds, layouts, ext. and i mean like pictures. maybe more like myspace, whatever. also, could you make it to where you can have your own, unique, personal URL or whatever? Like to where YOU can personalize it instead of it being something like “http://yahoo/connections/name/6475385″ ???? That would be awesome. and i agree with Dave. I hope this isn’t frustrating to you, but do you work JUST for Yahoo, or do you have another job?? I was pretty sure it was the 1st option. You haven’t been doing anything recently so why dont you work on this?? And if you are working on something, why dont you get people excited and add “COMING SOON” so we know you are doing stuff….please??? Thanks-

January 14th, 2009 at 7:47 pm

Congratulations to Carol Bartz on her appointment as CEO for yahoo. I hope that she takes some time to read the yahoo messenger blog posts and re-directs the messenger team to fix everything that they’ve broken or allowed to fail over the past few years. I know I’m probably dreaming but, it could happen. I might even win the lottery, LOL

January 15th, 2009 at 8:58 am

I would like to see an advanced search for the profiles. The search criteria would include drop downs for age range, state, Relationship Status and Looking For. Also it would be nice to have a city lookup that you could use a wildcard on.

January 17th, 2009 at 1:51 pm

super

January 18th, 2009 at 9:20 am

Just want to say how hellbent yahoo is on taking away features. I posted on here the way to post your online presence indicator on your profile using guestbook. It didn’t allow for the link but it did show the OPL for online or offline. Well, I guess I shouldn’t have posted it on here because I checked my profile today and apparently they’ve put a stop to that. I don’t see the big deal I guess anyways seeing how nobody can search my profile anyway unless they know my name and in that case they are probably already in my messenger list. But that does prove to me that Yahoo! is reading all of these comments we are posting but could care less to do anything about it, they want even respond to us. And it pisses me off because I’m a paid customer. I paid for minutes on messenger so I can easily take telephone calls while on messenger because I have dialup and I used to have to disconnect from the internet, take a call, then get back on. Well, now I hardly even use messenger anymore because it’s pointless, if you are like me you’ve got alot of friends on your list, but none of them get online anymore. They’ve all went to myspace or somewhere else, and you can’t even log into chat now to get friends to add to your list because the bots have taken it over. And now you can’t even search members to add some to the list. It’s all pointless, I’m not gonna just guess names in their stupid new search now to find friends that live lord knows how far away from me. What’s the point. I used to spend 90 percent of my time on yahoo, because I’d be checking my mail, chatting, searching profiles, or playing yahoo games, or whatever, now about 2 percent, my messenger isn’t even up and running now and I used to always have that on when I first booted up my computer. It’s pointless now. The only thing I use yahoo for now is mainly email. Yahoo could have just focused on 360 before screwing with the regular profiles, fix one thing before you screwup another. Hell that’s what 360 is supposed to be used for, social networking. You see it didn’t work what makes you think the yahoo profiles is going to work(talking to you people at Yahoo!). And the reason is not because 360 sucked or was stupid. It’s because you go on there, you search for profiles, and can’t even search by last log-in. You search through pages and pages of profiles that users no longer check or update. You can’t refine your search very well either. Nobody is going to waste their time searching through a bunch of profiles that are outdated. So they stop using the service as well since it is so unusable, and then there goes another profile to the list of pages users will scroll through to find for nothing.

And what do you do with the new profiles, first thing, take away our advanced search. Well, that’s all they needed to do to kill Yahoo!. Real simple, easy and effective. It won’t be that easy to revive Yahoo! because now if they do bring back and add search options, and fix there chat, they are going to have to get the word out to all of the yahoo users that have done move elsewhere because of Yahoo!s stupid thinking.
There is only a few things yahoo can do to fix this problem if they want more users.

1. Bring back a member search, just the way it was, with members online and all of that, and of coarse, make it to where the person decides where their profile is to be searchable or not. And bring back the OPI send IM link to the regular profiles.

2. Add a “last log-in” search option to your 360 profiles. Nobody like I said wants to waste time searching for unused profiles. You do that and it will keep users using their 360. Another thing too, take them to their profile after they sign in instead of the getting started page or whatever page that is that they also see before they sign in. Little things like that irritate people. Keep your open and social concept geared towards 360, as to leave the option open to those who don’t want the whole social networking thing, Instead of forcing it upon people with the new profiles.

3. Chat, we know you spent the time and effort in CAPTCHA, even though it didn’t work we did appreciate the effort. However, it didn’t work, what happened was after they all got kicked out, someone then had to log them back in, and they could no long jump rooms. So the bots didn’t get past CAPTCHA the humans still logged them in. So here is the fix…

Set it up, so that if a user gets ignored by more than 4 or 5 other users, not from any intervention from you by review or anything else, they automatically get kicked from the room and cannot return to the same room within a 24 hour period. Once you do that, that means that the spammer would have to actually sit at his or her computer all day, and would defeat the purpose in even having a bot, because that’s what the bot is for, to let it do all the spamming for you while you are off doing whatever. Everytime the human logs them in they’d shortly get logged back out. And you could also have it set up so that when they get kicked a set amount of times, they get banned from the server.

Now, what that does is free up the room for real people to join, and eliminates all the clutter in the message window and also stops alot of the pms when you first log in to chat that you get from alot of bots. So then you will have more and more real users joining chat because of that. More of an audience to view the ads on your chat screen, people will pay you to put their ads up then, nobody is going to pay you to put up an ad in your chat rooms just for a bunch of bots to see, which is why we all see the ad for Yahoo! Personals if we were to log into chat.

Yahoo!,
If you act quickly and follow those steps you will have users returning your site to use your services. The longer and longer you hold off the worse it will be, you are constantly loosing users. You need to listen to us because we are the ones who knows what is best. We are the ones that use your services so unlike you we aren’t ignorant to the facts. You could still leave the new profiles just like they are if you want to since you all are so damn proud of them, just do what I mentioned to bring the search back and fix the chat. Please listen to us for cryin’ out loud already. I mean damn, have you all thought about being politicians, you all at Yahoo! would make great ones, you keep talking about how things are going to get better, you tell us that you know what is best for us, and you completely ignore our voice.

January 20th, 2009 at 4:36 pm

Ah you know what, yahoo is doing this all on purpose. Must be. I mean think about it. Myspace uses Yahoo!’s trademark images on their site, with an upload form to invite all of your Yahoo! friends to Myspace and find out which ones already have Myspace or whatever. Well, you know they can’t do that without Yahoo!’s permission. So to me that shows how desperate the folks are at Yahoo! for money. Yahoo! is a sellout. Plain and simple. If they would just listen to us they would have users. They didn’t lose users because of the new social networking sites like Myspace, they lost users because they killed the user rooms and bots flooded the rooms. And Yahoo! is too stupid to realize that and fix the problem with the chat rooms and give us our search options back.

January 21st, 2009 at 4:31 pm

You all are going to love this who want to be able to search profiles again.
Don’t wait on Yahoo! to give you your search options back. Just do a google domain search. Go to google.com and type this into the search box.
“town gender site:profiles.yahoo.com”
example
“greensboro female site:profiles.yahoo.com”
check it out it works

January 21st, 2009 at 5:06 pm

quotes removed, you can also add the state abbreviation in there too to refine your search better

January 24th, 2009 at 3:31 am

I HATE this new Yahoo. Where is the MEMBER DIRECTORY?????
How do I find members who have the same interests I have???
Why did you wreck a really good thing? It was GREAT the old way. Is it true, you did this for the marketing capabilities and couldn’t give a rat’s ass about your customers here? No one drops by my Messenger anymore to say hi because they saw I was interested in the same things they were interested. NO ONE. You’ve ruined it for me.
Also, I cannot search for others with the same interests.
And when someone does write to me, I have no idea how they found my email address, and I can’t look up their profile anywhere, can I? Is it hiding somewhere? PUT BACK THE MEMBER DIRECTORY, PUT BACK THE COMMON INTEREST LINKS. PUT YAHOO BACK THE WAY IT WAS. The reason I NEVER use Face Book or any of the other “social sites” are because they are just like what you are turning Yahoo into. You’ve wrecked it, and it’s pretty obvious you couldn’t care less.
And that new “Yahoo Personals” is no different than all the other dating sites, it’s all about location and NOT interests. Don’t you understand anything? What made Yahoo so unique and interesting is that it WASN’T like all the others. Now you’ve made it like all the others. Nobody cares about location, that’s why people move half way across the country because they met someone out there who had the same interests they did, and they could care less about their own location or the new person’s location. They’re just excited they’re finding people who think the way they think. Oh why are you not listening to all these people who keep telling you how much they hate this? Stop the madness, put the old way back!

January 24th, 2009 at 8:48 pm

Yahoo was a great search engine… Yahoo answers, wonderfull…

The TRUE reason yahoo did away with the old profiles. Yahoo personals. To use yahoo personals U had to pay money to get to write mail to the people that match you, well with the old profile system, you could use the Advanced Members Directory and seach the entire members database for keywords people put in their profile thus effectivly bypassing yahoo personals… Why did they do it? The same reason everyone in this world does anything. Money. They werent getting as much money from us as their greedy little withered hearts wanted.

January 25th, 2009 at 10:44 am

any one want to comment

January 27th, 2009 at 10:32 am

I did try the link to old profiles and it works. If this information is still on Yahoo then why won’t they put it back up? http://www.yaprofilesearch.com

January 28th, 2009 at 9:16 pm

I was referred to this blog by tech support. If any of you are referring to your aliases no longer having your profile… and if you follow the instructions under settings you don’t see your alias name to be checked off to view, I was told by yahoo tech support on January 25th the following:
“Please be assured that we are aware of this problem and are working to
fix it. Our new profile on Yahoo! product is currently in BETA mode and
we’re fixing some of the quirks associated with our launch. We have identified the cause of your error and we’re working hard to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and we appreciate your patience while we correct this bug.
For updates on this issue, please visit our Product Blog at: http://www.yprofileblog.com/”
Maybe I’m impatient but other than reading complaints about the new profiles ( I’ve noticed many profiles that disappeared just like mine) – I have been checking and haven’t noticed any official new yahoo blogs here addressing the issue at all or even admitting it is a problem as in the email I received. Can someone enlighten me or am I among the confused?

February 1st, 2009 at 10:58 pm

larger size

February 6th, 2009 at 6:38 pm

Dear Melissa,

You’ve tried long and hard to bring yahoo a new profile system, and yet you have really listen to the people that use it. Sure, it’s a modern, ‘advanced’ system, but that doesn’t mean it is or will ever work. I know that you may be tired of reading all of the lengthy posts similar to ‘the new profile system stinks! Bring the old one back!’

I know that it may be time for ‘change’ but there is a large sense of irony in all of this. To be “Open and Social” you need to appeal to the people that are using the profile system and attract new people to Yahoo! But do you think it’s the best thing to bring around something that has already been done time, and time again? It does not appeal to the people that had used Yahoo! for years, and it more than likely will not appeal to more people that you want to join Yahoo!

As an old saying goes “Just because I can do something, it doesn’t mean I should.” Yahoo!’s new policies and profiles apply to this, changing some things that are fine the way they are. When something is changed that was fine in the first place and it is changed, there is an almost instantaneous uproar, just like what has happened on Yahoo! just after the new Beta for Profiles came out.

I’m sorry to say but Yahoo!’s CTO, Ari Balough, is wrong on a major part on what you have quoted from him – but is only right on one thing – “Social is not a destination”. But surely, there was a small error in that as well. It’s socialization, not social. Socialization is not a dimension, it’s the tone and mood people feel when they are able to socialize with people of similar interests. The profile system that was brought down last year brought people together through multiple profiles, where people can act as others with different profiles – or what is now known as ‘aliases’ which I thought was pretty clever at the time before there was an utter storm of rampant complaints on how the new system worked.

You need to remember, Melissa, that it isn’t just lonely adults that are on this program called Yahoo. There are many people from different walks of life that uses Yahoo to connect with people that are a great distance from each other, college students, drop out, hard working adults that just want to have some fun for once in their life, let off the load that they had gathered from their long day at work.

I admit, I am not a people with a job currently, nor am I a graduate of high school yet, but I know when there is corruption. You may be feeling cozy up with a job, being payed to do this and mess around with the profile system. You may or may not be getting enjoyment out of making people angered. You might not realize also how Yahoo’s finances are going. Since the middle of October of last year, it has been below 14 for the high, open, low, and close. The only thing I really think is saving Yahoo’s caboose is the other processes that Yahoo keeps up; for instance, Yahoo! Mail.

You may want to go and consider how the ‘customer’ feels about the ‘product’, after all, they are the ones that use Yahoo more than any of the official workers that make or break the system. That’s how businesses work, that’s how servers made my third parties are kept above water, because the people that use it and visit the site are happy with what they see and use.

You may want to consider all of the above to try and settle everything out before Yahoo! is brought down again and almost no one will be using the messenger.

I may be one small voice in a concerned crowd of many Yahoo!Messenger users, but I ‘talk’ softly to try and make an agreement between business and ‘customer’.

~Mou (Of JA:2)

February 9th, 2009 at 7:52 pm

Hate the new home page. Want to get rid of it. Can someone tell me how to do this?

February 17th, 2009 at 10:33 pm

This new social think is terrible! Both my husband and I are getting solicited by random people trying to “hook” up with us. WTF? We are getting links to webcam sites ect… We have our email set up for MAIL, for our BUSINESS! Yahoo you are forcing us to use someone else for our email service. After all these years, you have let us down.

February 23rd, 2009 at 4:00 pm

Am I way off base? I add “connections” to others, but there is no way to contact them. Please, please help me understand. I’m a long time Yahoo user It use to be you search for someone’s profile you click on “IM” and you were chatting with them. It worked so well.
Now you can click on a profile like http://profiles.yahoo.com/jrsygrrrl and there’s “nothing” .
Even if I’m connected to her…”nothing”! What is your reasoning behind designing a phone without a receiver? Isn’t the whole idea behind connecting to actually connect?

February 24th, 2009 at 10:25 am

Yeah and not to mention all of the above but what the flyin H did you do away with the yahoo members directory for? You cut a deal with classmates.com? You peep keep changing what was good about Yahoo with complete disregard to your members opinions! Dont forget its WE THE PEOPLE who will eventually decide YOUR fate! Is it time for a revolt here members? blamay22000@yahoo.com

February 25th, 2009 at 9:39 am

Does Yahoo management ever read problem logs, blogs, comments…Anything? The Staff seems content to ignoring issues in the name of the upcoming releases. They’ve been in beta since I started in 2000. And the scary thing is… It worked much better back then.

February 26th, 2009 at 1:30 pm

Why dosen’t yahoo try and fix the create alias problem for broadband users!!!!!?????? I wont be using anything on yahoo till it is….who wants email addy all over the IM and chat room world!!!!!! Thanks alot Yahoo.for wasting my time trying to fix it on my own…
P.S. your live help chat people don’t even know what to do!!!

March 10th, 2009 at 5:46 am

Dear Yahoo Management,
Compare stock charts for YHOO and GOOG. Nothing to do with the economy or stock trends. Apples and apples. Now tell me, was it worth ignoring the pleas of your loyal customers?
Jonathan (inferno603@yahoo.com)

March 12th, 2009 at 8:26 am

Yahoo Management
Reading all these comments show why you are heading to fail in creation of a social network. Your 360 is much better with its functionality even with it’s bugs. Your restrictions on alias defeat why many use Yahoo and create pressure to leave Yahoo. You need to add back you old capabilities and flexibility. You seem to be creating an up to date AOL portal and you know what happened to that.

March 19th, 2009 at 8:18 am

YAHOO CHAT POPPING UP IN EMAIL IS AWFUL IRRITATING TO SAY THE LEAST> I GUESS IT OPENS A NEW MARKET IN THESE TECHNICAL AGE FOR A NEW WEB SITE THAT GIVES THOSE THAT WANT THAT SERVICE CAN HAVE IT WITHOUT FEAR OF SOMEONE STAYING UPO ALL NIGHT TRYING TO FIX SOMETHING THAT ISN’T BROKEN> WILL BE MAKING A NEW EMAIL HOME SOME WHERE ELSE AND LET YAHOO DEAL WITH THE ANGER