Yahoo! Yahoo! by eric hayes, on Flickr

About a month ago I wrote my first post here entitled Giving Yahoo! another shot. Now it’s time to look back over the last month and record an update of how it went.

TL;DR I’m both impressed and disappointed. It’s a love/hate relationship, but the love outweighs the hate by at least 2:1

Yahoo! Mail

Let’s start with Yahoo! mail. I have to say I’m impressed by the new UI. It’s gorgeous and functional at the same time. I am not quite certain why yet, but in terms of actually working for me, I like it much better than GMail. It comes across more intuitive.

Migrating all my existing mail into Yahoo! mail was a bit painful, because it seems that Yahoo! rate limits the IMAP connection. That’s a sensible thing to do and will not be a problem during normal operations, but when you use IMAP to pump in close to 20000 e-mails it is, but one that is easily solved.

The operation of an inbox with 20000 emails on the other hand is like “No Sweat, this is Yahoo! and we do scale” easy. Their way to handle spam, is among the best I have seen. So all in all an awesome experience.

Which brings me to the hate part. I liked the experience, so I wanted to attach my own domain, which also host email for my family. Yahoo! offers a pay-for-play product for this. However that is just hostile to configure. First off it requires that you use Yahoo! DNS-Servers for your domain, rather than just setting MX records. I won’t go into all the details; suffice it to say: ‘Yahoo! Mail for a family is not really a viable option’

Never the less, I will definitely use Yahoo! mail for myself. I’ll forward all mails to it and have set it up to be able to send from all my addresses. The setup is actually pretty sweet.

The hate portion of this is basically that the whole personal domain stuff is a bit messy and that the Yahoo! implementation of IMAP seems to be a bit wonky (according to Yahoo! themselves). Those are not an issue if it’s just yourself using it. But once you are getting amateurs (read your company or your family) involved that makes it a no-go.

Flickr

Flickr is awesome, and is definitely back in my repertoire. Very nice, very easy. If only it were simpler to search. I often search for CC-Licensed stuff to use here, and every time I have to search by keyword then go into the advanced search scroll down select the licensing stuff and search again. Flickr could be such a great share image resource if only …

Well, I’ll be putting CC-Licenses on most of my pictures and maybe someday …

Tumblr

Another awesome acquisition. I have tried the whole blogging thing before; checked out Wordpress, SquareSpace, Bloggr, and just about everything else. The Tumblr concept of simple easy posts where the default is short and sweet but you can go full out like this one makes it just right for me.

There is actually a fair chance that I’ll be much more prolific a writer than ever in the past.

My Yahoo!

Has become my default place I go first thing in the morning to catch up with what is going on in the world. I set it up with a mixture of my personal interests, world events and gossip and it provides me with the perfect information start to my day.

I have to say though that the default setup I encountered was pretty good already. So personal adjustments aren’t really all that necessary.

Yahoo! Groups

Simple, intuitive, full featured group organisation. I am in the process of migrating the mailing list for my kids classes to Yahoo! groups to enhance the parental interaction.

Aside from that I’m trying to get a regular NodeJS meetup in Vienna of the ground. Groups will definitely be at the core of organising all off that.

Inspiration

So far I like what I am experiencing with Yahoo! very much. It truly is a very compelling experience, much more so than I have experienced with Google. Google has obvious advantages, Apps and Search being just the most prominent, but wherever Yahoo! has comparable products, Yahoo! provides the nicer and kinder version. iGoogle is shutting down, no wonder it can’t even compare to My Yahoo!. Google Groups vs. Yahoo! Groups is the difference between these two:

Arctic 01

beach

both provide access to the ocean, but which one would you rather immerse yourself in. I guess Yahoo! is less automaton and simply friendlier. And that appeals to me.

All of this has inspired me to actually engage more. The last couple of years, I have looked at the web as a tool or set of tools: mechanical, practical, sterile, artificially funny (think I’m feeling lucky). Yahoo! has inspired me to give the web another shot at being a fun place to hang.

That inspiration has led to me getting my digital life back in order. For the first time in … well forever, I actually have a consistent online identity. For the first time in just as long, I actually have secured my accounts in a meaningful way (i.e.: maybe not use the same password across the entire net ;) ).

So as a resume of the first month of giving Yahoo! another shot, I have to say it’s been worth it. I’ll post another update on how things are a bit down the road, yet if things hold as they are, this might be among the best things to happen to my online life in a while.