What’s Up With Yahoo?

 I’ve been watching the blogosphere’s love/hate relationship with Yahoo! these past few months with interest and wonder why is Yahoo losing the battle to Google?

I like Yahoo. Yahoo has been the dominant social web portal for a decade. Not Google, not MySpace or Microsoft, but Yahoo. Y! helped people come together with an easy-to-use instant messenger, games, chat rooms and more. Who else can match this? This is social web dominance. Even today, no other social website can compare.

Yahoo has made some smart purchases recently to help solidify their social dominance with some of the web’s most useful applications.

1. Flickr-Social photos
2. Del.icio.us-Social bookmarking
3. Upcoming- Social event notifications
4. Mybloglog- Social blogging
5. Jumpcut- Social video sharing/mixing

Yahoo has made huge strides to compete with the fantastic Gmail service by enhancing their own Yahoo Mail service. Unlimited inbox storage trumps Gmail’s 2+ gigabytes. It even has a nice desktop application feel to it. Although admittingly, I am addicted to Gmail. It is my primary web account. All mail from Gmail is forwarded onto Yahoo mail as a backup.

So, moving on to my recent Yahoo encounter…

On Monday, I discovered that I could swap Yahoo ID’s (2) while I was looking in my Flickr account. My desired ID was not registered in Flickr but an old one that I never used. Except for Flickr. So anyway, once I switched it to my desired ID, I decided to delete the old, unused account.

POOF!

I no longer had access to Flickr because Yahoo deleted my desired account instead. I have no idea why, because  I had specifically requested and verified deletion of the “old” ID.

I received an automated email from Yahoo confirming deletion.

** This is only a notification.  You do NOT need to respond. **
This email is to confirm that your Yahoo! account, “mojodenbow,”
has been recently terminated per your request.  Your account
has been deactivated and will be deleted from our user registration
database in approximately 90 days. This delay is necessary to
discourage users from engaging in fraudulent activity. To satisfy
terms agreed to in the Yahoo! Finance Terms of Service, personal
information for users subscribed to Yahoo! Finance Premium
Services will be kept by Yahoo! for at least 3 years after the
subscription date.
If you did not request this action please reply to this message.
Thank you for using Yahoo!. You can always sign up for a new
account by clicking on any “Sign In” or “Sign Me Up” link
appearing on the front page of most Yahoo! Services.

Yahoo! Member Services

Um, WHAT? I did not request THAT account. Anyway, the account was restored after a 5 question inquiry.

WHEW!

Needless to say, I am still very pleased with Yahoo for restoration of my desired account and Flickr access.

What Yahoo! services do you enjoy the best? Is there anything you’d like to see from Yahoo in comparison to other webware applications? Shout it out in the comments.