On my last review https://mouthshut.com/readreview/30682-1.html where I wrote about Goggle, the search engine, I found out that some people claiming that
they still use Yahoo as it is their Favourite . Although I know it as a fact that Google is better compared to Yahoo as a search engine, people still love YAHOO, the very namesimply because of it’s multi-faceted usability. I accept it as a fact that if you ask any person the Question ’’Do you Yahoo’’ ... there would hardly be a individual who would be able answer ’’NO’’ . And by this I don’t mean the person using Yahoo as a search engine , or Free Email Provider . Why is this and how could I make such a bold statement - that is the theme of this review of mine.
Yahoo is simply not just another portal for a web surfer. It is almost synonymous to the very concept of Internet. From personal experience, I have found that when I have tried to speak about the Internet to people who are less
aware of this world outside there regular world the first thing that comes to these peoples mind is 2 names - Hotmail and Yahoo. It’s almost like the TERM, XEROX is more colloquial than Photocopy . Like very few people are aware
that XEROX is just the name of a particular organisation that sell photocopy machines. Why is this?
Simply because Yahoo has grown into such big that every web service that you can think of , Yahoo has it. Today, having a Yahoo email account doesn’t provide you with only a Free Email provider. That same account can be used for accessing
multiple other features like - Yahoo / Geocities Free Home Page , Yahoo Messenger , Yahoo Chat , Yahoo Groups , Yahoo Greetings , Games , Classifieds, Address Book, Briefcase, Horoscope, Personal/Dating ....... the list is endless!!! And if that’s not all ... Yahoo has got local mini portals for different countries like India , Japan , Canada even more localization with Yahoo for different cities in US of A.
Even in the days of Internet slump, add to that the post-11th September effect, when major portals started feeling the crunch and began to close their doors for Free email users and Free Web Space leechers , as for example , https://123india.com, https://usa.net and many others , YAHOO survived . And not just survived, it slowly started bettering it’s features and made the experience smoother.
Some major points notched up by yahoo by this, undoubtedly.
Be it a newbie or be it a veteran on the Net, he is bound to have multiple email accounts from different ISP. A hotmail account, a indiatimes account, a yahoo account and rediff or email.com is not unusual. Different people have
different reasons .... most people have varied Net Identities and use a different email address for each , some use one identity for business emails , one ID for personal email and one for registering to varied newsletters or subscriptions . I run my own web hosting business and hence I can have unlimited email accounts I want on my own server. But I still have a yahoo email account because of the additional benefits I am bound to get . And those additional benefits are not provided by any other provider.
Yahoo Messenger is one of the most widely used Personalized chat software. A person who is not interested in chatting on a public chat room, they always use the latest FAD i.e. messengers. Many sites have similar softwares, Hotmail has it’s MSN messenger, AOL has it’s instant messenger, RediffBol, Indiatimes Messenger and of course the ICQ . But having a messenger client was not enough for Yahoo - they had to excel over others , so with the same software you can now chat with multiple friends using Conference . If that’s not enough, voice chat using a microphone and speaker and YahooWebcam using a Video Camera brings you a step closer to your relatives or friends living 1000 miles apart.
A portal should essentially have a Free Home Page section and so did yahoo. Yahoo-Geocities is probably one of the largest free web space service provider if not The largest. Not only you get a Free space, you also have the Site Builder tool that allows even novices to create, upload and publish their Home pages pretty easily. Talk about value addition!!
I remember when I was younger I used to be a fan of Steffi Graff (I still am)and me and some of my friends used to share pictures of her and share information, match statistics and performances , discuss about her matches. And
to do that we had used something called Yahoo Groups which would provide a basic picture uploading space along with a Email List functionability - meaning every one subscribed to the group Email address would get the email even if each of us individually didn’t know everyone’s email. What’s more it was even stored on a Web Archive, so that if anyone didn’t wish to receive regular emails could
catch up on a Yahoo Group URL. I think currently there are simply N number of such groups on every damn topic of interest.
Online Game sites are available on the NET ... maybe some thousands or maybe more , but the last time I visited https://yahoo.com I noticed that there were 143, 429 people playing games on Yahoo Network only. I doubt whether any dedicated gaming communities or sites have that many participants in a day .
This way I can go on talking about the various other features of yahoo , but thats not my point . My point being people on the internet ( in India , more so ) do not have as much time to spend or probablhy feel it is too costly . So if they can get all services/ requirements fullfilled in one site , they wont wander around searching for other sites. Especially if they liked Yahoo Mail or yahoo essenger , basic feeling would be Yahoo Personals would be as good. They would rather Request for Paid web hosting from yahoo only rather than some local 8 months old company providing similar service(an example) .
Whats even better is the My Yahoo functionabilty - where by you are able to put your favourite and interesting services you use from yahoo in a single page and get updated and latest information. Like your Stock quotes , or Daily horoscope or Mail Inbox.
In a day an average user is bound to use one of these services for sure. Don’t you ?