New My Yahoo Signals It Has Abandoned the Geeks

Does anyone among the tech influential spend any significant time on Yahoo anymore? I sure don't and for years I did. I have a couple of their news feeds, but for the most part it seems like all the action is on Google and a bunch of startups. The only sites where Yahoo has inroads with geeks are del.icio.us and Flickr and neither of them is monetized. It's obvious they're too nervous about alienating the community, so they play it conservative here.

I remember an era gone by when Yahoo was just like Google. They took chances. They recognized that the "techfluencers" were critical for driving mass adoption. Now it seems like they're a big conservative company that's going straight for Maw and Paw America. That's cool and it plays to their strengths but why own del.icio.us and Flickr? They should flip them to Google. Cut your losses Yahoo and invest in your mainstream winners - like Yahoo Answers. Oh and Yahoo 360 is totally a site that deserves better. It's a ghost town. Sell it to Six Apart. They'll nourish it.

The new My Yahoo is another example of how the portal has turned its back on the geeks. Yahoo had an opportunity here to take widgets - which are popular with the tech elite - and push them mainstream. They have always had a knack for making the geeky easier but the new site is just basically a fresh coat of paint. What a lost opportunity to build on all of the great work Arlo Rose did with Konfabulator and port it to the web. I wonder how he feels living in such a conservative company.

I remember just three years ago how Yahoo had serious Web 2.0 mojo. It took RSS and pushed it far and wide. Now it has turned it's back on RSS like it's a plague. The same goes for blog search too. Yahoo is clearly trying to be the un-Google. They have ceded the war for the geeks to Google. That doesn't bode well for sites like MyBlogLog. And further, it hurts their chance in winning in the Web 2.0 world. We are the ones who set trends. Look no further than Second Life and Twitter.

By the way, this is a smart strategy for Yahoo. It follows their strengths. However it does mean that there's a bunch of Yahoo properties that are not like the others. They stick out like sore thumbs and I bet they will one day be sold.