Articles about Yahoo

When a company wants to reinvent itself, portray a different direction or show a modernization, the change is usually accompanied by the arrival of a new logo. Microsoft, for example, last year changed its decades old design to reflect its transition into a devices and services company.

Now Yahoo, which under Marissa Mayer is attempting to modernize its image and become more relevant after years of neglect, is planning to change its logo too. No, it’s not going to be swapping the exclamation point for a question mark or anything as interesting as that, but it is going to try on various logo styles.

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A month ago Yahoo announced plans to offer up old email addresses that have been inactive for a year or longer. My colleague Brian Fagioli pointed out the worrying privacy flaws of such an undertaking, but Yahoo says it’s confident its plans won’t compromise user security. Hopefully that’s true.

If you want to try and claim a recycled Yahoo username/email address -- your own name without a ridiculous string of numbers after it, for example, or something else entirely -- you can now register your interest with Yahoo.

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With privacy higher than ever on the news agenda, it is not surprising people are starting to wake up to the fact they have happily allowed all kinds of personal information about themselves to appear online. It might be too late to stem the tide, but if you are thinking about reviewing your personal privacy, one place to start might be with the apps added to various social networks.

If this idea appeals, then desktop users should install one of MyPermissions Cleaner for Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari, while iPhone and Android users can go with Online Privacy Shield -- once done, you are ready to start taking action to tighten privacy settings.

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Let us pause for a moment to remember AltaVista. Current owner Yahoo quietly announced in a blog post at the end of last week that the once popular search engine is to close on July 8. The news was tucked away in a raft of other closure announcements. Users will be redirected to Yahoo Search.

It's hard to appreciate now that in the days before Google's algorithm made the fast indexing of large numbers of sites possible, searching the web was something of a hit and miss affair. Search engines relied on fixed indexes that were slow to update and found it hard to cope with the rapidly increasing number of sites.

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Yahoo is rolling out what it describes as a "more personal, intuitive and modern design" for its News site.

According to Mike Kerns, Vice President, Product, "The first thing that you’ll notice about the new Yahoo News is that it was designed around your interests and preferences. We made the news stream customizable so you can tell us what content you’d like to see more of. Yahoo! News will get smarter over time -- the more you use it when signed in with your Yahoo! ID, the more it learns about your preferences, creating a personal news hub just for you. And the new News is super-fast, articles now load faster than before".

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We take for granted that we can go to a search engine and get search results without pulling out a credit card. However, nothing in life is free -- including search results. When you visit most search engines, advertisements pay for your experience. While there is nothing wrong with using advertising to finance search engines, the FTC has warned that the line between advertisements and search results has become muddied. And so, it has sent a letter to Google, Bing, Yahoo plus several smaller search engine companies.

The FTC says “In recent years, the features traditional search engines use to differentiate advertising from natural search results have become less noticeable to consumers, especially for advertising located immediately above the natural results ('top ads')”. In other words, the advertisements listed on the top of the page, before the search results, can be confusing to users.

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Big Brother is watching you. Or rather technology giants like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo are. The firms track their users relentlessly, and use that information to provide a tailored online experience (and maybe share it with government agencies).

Baynote, which provides personalized customer experience solutions for multi-channel retailers, has put together an interesting visual insight into what data the tech titans gather about you, how it’s collected, and what purposes it’s put to.

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You never know who you are going to get.

Yahoo has announced that starting mid-July, it is going to begin recycling email addresses. All Yahoo email addresses that have been inactive for 12 months or longer, will be made available again. Users will be able to stake claims on desired and expired Yahoo email addresses on a first-come, first serve basis. This sounds like a fun thing for Yahoo users who want a shorter or easier email address.

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The clock is very much ticking for anyone still working with Yahoo Mail Classic. As of today, an upgrade will roll out forcing users to switch to the newest version. This in itself might not seem like earth-shattering news, but it is Yahoo's handling of the upgrade -- and the hidden payload -- that has users up in arms.

There are few forced upgrades that are welcomed unreservedly -- as changes to Gmail prove -- but this one is rather more sinister. Put simply, if you want to keep using Yahoo Mail you have to make the switch to the latest version or your inbox will become inaccessible. Sounds reasonable? Possibly not.

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After ten years with Yahoo as its mail and news provider, UK internet company BT is switching to a different service. Starting in June it will begin migrating its customers to a new service named BT Mail which will be run by California-based Critical Path.

Nick Wong, director of online for BT's consumer division says, "We will be switching customers' email over to BT Mail, which will include the features and functions they expect from a modern email service. We will be keeping our customers fully informed about what changes to expect and when they will be able to enjoy the new services."

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Despite Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's promise not to "screw up" Tumblr following its recent acquisition, the move has caused some disquiet in the user community.

Posting on Tumblr, of course, many users are worried about the impact advertising may have on the Tumblsphere, others that Yahoo will change the ethos of the site. There was disquiet about rumors Yahoo would push to make it more family friendly by filtering content too -- around 1 in 6 Tumblr pages is reckoned to contain porn. Despite assurances, and the fact that the circulating message about the clean up has been exposed as fake, there's a lot of distrust out there.

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My oldest email address, circa 1996, is with Yahoo -- just three letters. I joined Flickr in October 2005 and Tumblr in May 2008. Three years ago, I stopped paying for Yahoo Mail, mostly abandoned the photo-sharing site and essentially stopped blogging at the social network. But I'm psyched now. Maybe former Googler Marissa Mayer can save the grandpa dot-com after all.

Today colleague Wayne Williams asks: "What will it take for people to care about Yahoo again?" "May 20th" is my answer. On the same day that Yahoo bought Tumblr for a cool $1.1 billion cash, the rickety dot-com gave Flickr the biggest makeover ever. Subscribers get 1TB of storage, on a site suddenly beautifully modern and supported by a hot, Android app. Google CEO Larry Page, Mayer just thumbed her nose at you.

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Yahoo is a media and technology giant. It is claimed that around 700 million people still visit Yahoo websites every month, and yet I personally can’t remember the last time I went to a Yahoo site, and I don’t know anyone who uses Yahoo for search, email, or news -- or visits the fabled Yahoo home page.

To me Yahoo mostly exists in the past, largely forgotten and gathering dust. I have photos stored on Flickr, but I haven’t uploaded anything there for ages. The last time I tried Yahoo -- following a lackluster revamp of the site -- I stumbled across broken link after broken link and gave up.

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Flickr is the service Yahoo forgot about between its latest Mail and homepage redesigns. It's boring, outdated, bland, ugly and uninviting and these are just a couple of the words that cross my mind right now. Thankfully, Flickr wants to change all that with the latest revamped version, announced late-yesterday. You know, maybe the cool kids will want to hang out again.

The biggest change comes from the new website, which drops the old design. It's now fresh, simple and modern and gives the cloud service character. Big photos in the stream, menu bar on top and the usual suspects on the right -- Explore, Flickr Blog and a list of people you may (want to) know -- dominate the uncluttered experience. Friends get a similarly-styled profile page which emphasizes shared content.

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As has been widely rumored over the last few days, Yahoo has paid $1.1 billion for blogging platform Tumblr. In recent times this is the most paid for an Internet acquisition since Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion last year.

Founded by David Karp in 2007 from a bedroom of his mother's New York apartment, the attraction of Tumblr has always been its clean interface and ease of use, which allows people to be up and blogging within minutes. The service has around 217 million users worldwide and is the 24th most popular site in the US according to research company Quantcast.  The company employs 175 people and claims to have more than 100 million blogs.

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