Yahoo launched their new profile product last week as part of their big plan to social networkize the entire Yahoo world. Every Yahoo profile was reset, and users were asked to go through a process of recreating it.
The comments from users were unambiguous - they were pissed off.
Common complaints include the fact that the new profile must include your full name, which your connections (friends) can see, as well as the removal of a few features that I’ve never heard of (like Cool Links) that apparently some percentage of users really, really liked. But by far the biggest complaint was the fact that all of the information in the old profiles was wiped clean, and users were presented with a blank slate like the one above (which is mine). Some users also noted that there was no message on that blank profile letting users know what just happened to their data. You had to go to the blog posts to understand what happened.
Meanwhile, Yahoo scurried to respond. In one of the blog posts, Melissa Daniels, Yahoo’s Community Manager, said “We know this has been a rough transition for some of you and, and are committed to helping you use, understand, and (hopefully) enjoy your new profile.”
That just seemed to enrage users more. An example comment: “I agree Making a second rate copy of facebook while breaking everything else people come to yahoo for is a good way to go out of business.”
As critical as I’ve been of Yahoo recently, I’m mostly supporting them in the profile transition.
Communication with users was definitely poorly executed, and users should have had a message on their profile page telling them what was going on. But the team is clearly trying to fix that. VP Communities Jim Stoneham, who just joined Yahoo six weeks ago to lead the project (Welcome to Yahoo, Jim!), has a single message on his profile: “listening.” And Yahoo has at least kept a copy of the old profile information for users who want it back:
We also know lots of you worked hard on your old profiles and want your data. If you feel like you’re missing data, we’ve saved a copy of your old profile (and alias) and our Customer Care team can retrieve this information. You won’t, however, be able to revert back to your old profile format, but you will be able to get any data that you think is missing. To do this, please go here http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/profiles/general.html to contact Customer Care.
A lot of profile data is still there, anyway. I went through the new profile setup and it retained my name, age and interests, and displayed it after I was done.
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I’ve never met a developer team that didn’t know how to migrate old data to a new platform. I never thought I’d see a huge company neglect to do it, as its the most basic thing in the world, but… well, Yahoo hasn’t made a lot of good calls recently.
Isn’t that what openID id for?
Umm… No. OpenID is for logging in across multiple sites like Passport lets you do.
I think its too late for social networking. Just like search even social networking should be friendly to novice users, and here “connections” being far inferior to “friends”.
Will comment further only if yahoo able to do any magic with this.
They don’t want to migrate all the data because they want to force REAL NAMES because that is what advertisers want.
Marketers are dying for real name and contact info so they can “join the conversation” (read:spam) with consumers via every channel possible. They need REAL info, but can’t force it with college-email-only approach of facebook.
Well… look how they messed up their chat rooms years ago. Do they even have chat rooms today?
Why is this a big deal?
Oh, wait
http://finance.google.com/fina.....amp;ntsp=0
OMG, look at what this did, JUST LOOK.
This is cause and effect at work!
Nice pick up Arrington.
The markets are closed. don’t be stupid.
What happened to techlusive?
Why’d it shut down so fast after rockstardevs launched?
Lawsuit?
All your blogs disappeared off the ‘net.
Perhaps the locator guy could locate his blogs.
try backtype.com works for me.
“biggest complaint was the fact that all of the information in the old profiles was wiped clean, and users were presented with a blank slate”
Did this not make sense the first time you read it? Throw their stock quote aside—things do still matter regardless of how the stock behaves. A situation like this would be a “big deal” to me even if the company wasn’t on the stock exchange. For instance, what would you think if all of your emails were accidentally erased by the company storing them (Google, Yahoo, etc) and you had to contact Customer Care to get them back?
Suppose that you had been accessing some of the medical support groups on Yahoo Groups for years, sharing sensitive personal/family information on the assumption that all anyone would ever see was your carefully chosen, presumed anonymous Yahoo ID. Heck, even being a member of a group can be sensitive information. After years of going to your profile page and seeing only the barest minimum of information, now you go to your profile page and see your full name, possibly your employer, plus other information visible on your profile. It turns out that by default, the info is only visible to your “connections” (I think, but I’m still not 100% sure), but due to the poor launch communications, it takes you about a half hour to figure that out. In those thirty minutes, you feel many emotions about Yahoo — none of them good ones — while wondering how many friends, relatives, and coworkers now know the real identity of SuicideSurvivor1985abcdef@yahoo.com (not a real id; used for illustration purposes).
Yahoo was at the right place at the right time at the beginning. Ever since then it’s been non-stop comedy watch them try to screw up despite their first-mover advantage. Almost there guys!
I agree. They were lucky to get off the mark before many others in the ’90s. Name recognition drove traffic and covered all the mistakes they made. I mean big mistakes like laying out huge bucks for acquisitions. Think broadcast.com, think geocities. They spent billions on these things and never made a dime. Then in the past Web 2.0 hype they spent on a bunch more of them. Where has all this gotten them??? Yeah, we all know where… and could see it coming.
Yahoo’s name recognition allowed all their mistakes to be forgiven by the market for over a decade. Now there name is wearing thin and has been superseded by others in many areas. Their name recognition can longer save them from the tumult of poor decisions and execution.
The sun is setting on Yahoo. Yahoo is going to the same place as it’s peers: Lycos, AOL, Excite, AltaVista, InfoSeek.
They had a good run.
“The sun is setting on Yahoo. Yahoo is going to the same place as it’s peers: Lycos, AOL, Excite, AltaVista, InfoSeek.”
It is a pit, but it may just be that way with or without Microsoft.
But what if Yahoo does not get bought, does not fold, and comes out on top with a devastating product and service to give it almost a second life?
What if Yahoo rises from the ashes? What if Yahoo proves us all wrong? What then?
Arrington. Are you ever going to get a real job again? Or are you going to just screw around musing about these spaghetti western code whackers for the rest of your life?
I sure hope I’ll never have a real job again.
Wow, if Facebook ever did this they would be out of business, fast.
Great job Yahoo.
(Not)
“(Not)”
Hi, welcome to the 21st century and adulthood.
Hi, welcome to a blog on the Internet
Hi, welcome to my comment to a blog on the Internet.
Facebook is not all that. They just got massive press hype and tons of users to jump on board. Now what do they really have? What exactly is facebook?
Profile page, Groups, Fan pages, Event pages, Chat, News feeds, and some useless aps that are hot or a month or two. What exactly is that? To make matters worse their new design is not all that either. Facebook is just another Bebo.
Come on Mike at least put some iamage as an avatar in the profile..
Otherwise maybe Yahoo is finally wising up..as the fix it fast efforts is a welcome change from fuck up always..
sfgsdfgsdfg
Something to learn from for our launch on Tuesday. Michael do you want a pre-lanuch invitation and ‘network’ with scoble on SmibsNet?
OMG, scoble took the bait. Leverage that to pressure all his online friends onto your site as well.
(
!= revenue
!== revenue
&& wish you were linkedin
) ? reality : tooLate
Chris, relax. We’re having some fun getting our stuff online and I certainly have no leverage whatsoever. Besides, SmibsNet is free so don’t go too crazy on the revenue predictions. I think we should celebrate some good news, especially these days. I look forward to see you on SmibsNet.
p.
Psst, I don’t like LnikedIn but that’s between us.
“Psst, I don’t like LnikedIn but that’s between us.”
I can tell by your misspelling it.
“I think we should celebrate some good news, especially these days.”
The only people that are dropping out and cutting back are people like Loic that had no previous software experience that haphazardly thought they’d try their hand at the software biz back in 2005-2006 after MySpace sold out to Newscorp.
Is it really hurting the tech industry if they all return from whence they came?
I don’t think there’s any bad news to break to celebrate. Sure online advertising budgets went down for major companies.
But do you know why?
Those companies threw 2-5 million dollars out of the window 1-2 years ago because people like Mike Arrington and Schonfeld told them that viral videos were the hype du jour.
As soon as the hype du jour people disappear because they can’t get the booze and coke or whatever they do at their beach house cabanas on weekends, we can have a new post 2000 era. I made so much cash in that era it was extreme.
I’m celebrating the meltdown. Because
A. it won’t last
B. the bigger corps won’t believe the hype du jour from Techcrunch and other echo chambers and waste budgets on it anymore. Which means more money for the rest of us.
I’m starting to pool investment money to buy popular web2.0 failures at cut rate prices and resell them as scripts to the public.
Please get a hold of me if you are interested.
techlusive_AT_gmail.com
I have 2 programmers on oDesk to repackage the software for sale.
I’m going to pick up all the web 2.0 garbage and make it profitable. I invite you to invest with me.
You too Peter. Now is a perfect opportunity to pick up $50/hour work at $0.50 and sell it wholesale. 1 portal, all web 2.0 sites in the library are for sale similar to the iPhone apps store.
Yahoo repeatedly reassured users that this would be where all the user content from the Yahoo 360 debacle will go, such as all the blogs people took the time to write. Should be interesting to see how that goes.
I started using Yahoo about 2 months after their initial launch way back in the 90’s. I was hesitant to leave them and was behind the curve for a long time until I finally decided to make the switch to Google two years ago. Turned out it was probably the best decision I made because.
I didn’t realize people used Yahoo that much anymore. They probably could have closed up, powered down all their servers and I wouldn’t have noticed for 5 or 6 months.
When things like that happen, I am asking myself why they don’t simply give their users the option of choosing between the now platform, or simply keeping the old one?!
Sheeeeeeeee-it, where is Hvi Hoffman when you need her? Eh?
You think Yahoo is bad- try comcast.net. I had my outgoing email cut off two days ago. I had no idea why I could receive email but could not send out anything. Turns out the comcast network has a problem with “zombie” email spammers and is shutting down outgoing email on tons of clients. No notifying- just shutting them off. I reinstalled my email client because I thought this was the problem, and only by sheer luck I went on their chat line and found out about the problem. The solution was to change the port number to get smtp working again. I would have never known how to fix this problem for comcast just cut off my email with no notification.
Wow. This honestly sounds like an APRIL FOOLS JOKE! haha. A comedy of errors.
The biggest part of any software upgrade or transition is moving the data. Why Yahoo thought it would be OK to wipe profiles clean is a riddle within a conundrum. My only thought would be to get rid of posers out there and force them to use real names.
…Or they needed to pull a rabbit out of the hat for Q3 conference call & couldn’t fully complete the project in time. So they just launched *another* half-assed product.
Don’t really see a point in setting up a profile on Yahoo!. I mean, I see the company’s goals here, but I do not see any user benefits. After all it’s just another Facebook, however tied to a dying Search Engine.
Listen contact me to my privet mail for a deal Ok.
Joe
I just noticed this earlier this morning when clicking through an old Yahoo Groups mailing list for my home owners association. I was thinking how few of my fellow residents filled out their profiles… I said “wow, they must be really paranoid and not want to share any information I guess”
Then I clicked on mine thinking I’d be all spiffy and filled out with stuff.
Oops. Empty and just as blank.
For a while, I’ve not been happy with the Yahoo Groups mailing list and I’m thinking NING might be a better choice for the HOA.
Then I realized the amazing factoid that less than 50% of the residents are on the mailing list today and getting them to join YASNS is probably going to take participation down to 10% or less.
Yahoo is proving the silver lining to destroying aspects of an online communities that contain change resisting groups. It is a testament to the fact that a company can indeed be rewarded with loyalty for dropping the ball for a group.
Yahoo gets more loyalty by screwing up a migration of data so badly that a full migration away for a community is actually scarier due to the potential participatory losses upon conversion to an entirely new service provider (NING).
“Yahoo gets more loyalty by screwing up a migration of data so badly that a full migration away for a community is actually scarier due to the potential participatory losses upon conversion to an entirely new service provider (NING).”
… but then again what the hell does NING have to do with this. They weren’t even mentioned and aren’t a competitor.
I mean look at it this way. MySpace, which is clearly what they are trying to copy here, was almost unusable after the first week of release. The site was REALLY bad. It had severe errors for the first 2 years that made it very hard to use. People regularly lost entire profiles.
SO WHO CARES.
I’m not a Yahoo advocate, but put it in context. They screwed up far less worse than their competitors in this field.
Yahoo was very smart about doing this. They are taking a user base that is extremely large and making MySpace out of it. That’s leverage.
I think they are far too late, but that’s leverage.
Had they done this in 2004 it WOULD have worked. Now it will go the way of Yahoo 360 because nobody cares anymore and defacto standards for this type of service were established 3 years ago.
Innovate, don’t capitulate.
*ahem*
“For a while, I’ve not been happy with the Yahoo Groups mailing list and I’m thinking NING might be a better choice for the HOA.”
Explore decaf options Chris.
Seriously.
They’re different types of statements, and this statement you made STILL makes no sense:
“Yahoo gets more loyalty by screwing up a migration of data so badly that a full migration away for a community is actually scarier due to the potential participatory losses upon conversion to an entirely new service provider (NING).”
Yahoo gets loyalty because users are afraid to go to NING? But only because they screwed up?
You could register a group on any site including MSN, Google, a social network ect… in 10 seconds. You could set up GNU mailman on your own webserver.
Google Groups would replace that entire funcionality and then some.
So WTF?
Ning is a white label social network, not a groups manager or mailing list man.
It’s like the iPower people on YouTube with “Tanya” constantly mentioning ning for no good reason.
Seriously, I bet you & your family pass around hot Karls 24/7.
hehe, marrington.
As a long time 360 user, the new profile system is a huge disappointment. No blog and no social element to it. It looks like Mash Lite. However, I don’t understand all of the whining. Yahoo’s original profile system was very limited anyway. Yahoo has taken a pointless profile and made it semi useful. As a replacement for 360, the new profile underwhelming. However, it is an improvement over the existing profile. Now as for the way Yahoo is handling the communications on this issue,, it is totally Amateur Hour at Yahoo. The Peanut Butter Manifesto hasn’t lead to any changes.
Hey. You think if Yahoo got like some rally negative comments on TechCrunch for like a few days they could fall to a $9.99 special?
I’m waiting for Mike to push YHOO into a mini 1939 microcosmic depression.
(opens Ameritrade commander in preparedness)
Yaho…oops!
cool
what a bunch of lamers.
the big complaints seem to be:
1. absolutely NO warning …which is unforgiveable….
2. only one identity per email address ..whereas there used to be many allowed (group users in particular seem to be furious at this)
3. group management in Yahoo groups is just about impossible now
4. the failure to transfer information from the old profiles by default or have an easy way to access it
5. absolutely no consultation or feedback sought …
how could Yahoo be so dumb!!!
do the words total stuff up come to mind
and meanwhile over at Yahoo owned Flickr …they have done the same thing with the main user pages and are being shredded in the main Flickr blog
Yahoo would be a great car company in Detroit.
This is a pretty balsy and disruptive move by yahoo. For sure they think that people will just flock back to re-enter their information. But what if they don’t. Yahoo will probably lose a lot of users to Microsoft, Google - I imagine many users will take this opportunity to part their relationship with yahoo for a fresh start somewhere else.
Boris
http://www.thewebwar.com
A balsy and disruptive move? I think you mean short-sighted and suicidal
seriously, who cares? nobody uses profiles.yahoo.com anyhow.
The fact that users of the service are complaining shows that they care.
What a dumbass.
From our point of view, yes, how could yahoo be so stupid? From yahoo’s, however, think of their HUGE ecosystem of services (flickr, upcoming, mail, etc, etc) and to migrate profiles into a new unified profile model would’ve been hell (privacies, what if there were conflicting user ids, etc, etc).
If you care, you would put your info in again. If you dont, you wouldn’t have used your yahoo social-ness anyway. My point is we’re acting as if yahoo are a bunch of morons - and they’re not.
Why don’t they just integrate social networking features into every Yahoo mail account?
Yahoo’s just has too much shit to worry about now. They are dealing with exactly what IAC was going with in August, but as a single brand. Too many things to deal with, to many in house brands, too many executives wanting different things, etc. Do you feel me Mike?
I don’t see what users are complaining about. After reading all the post above I went to the url for my profile. Of course nothing was there. I then clicked the update button and all of my old information was prefilled as I went through 2 clicks, invited my messenger and addressbook buddies and in 2 clicks I had a pretty decent profile page. Have you tried that “update” button?
Yahoo’s gone insane. Who wants a profile on yahoo, anyway?
Weird. I found out about the new profiles when I read this blog the other day. I did see the empty profile. But then I went in to edit my profile and when I went to edit, all the old information was prefilled in the form boxes. Nothing was lost. Even the cool links, which while no longer a section, the cool link urls were just appended to the last box in the form.
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It is very surprsing that such a big company which is currently experiences bad publicity as it is would make such decision
Oppps.
Transforming a business’s core service when times are bad is never a good sign. The approach making Yahoo! as “me too” social network probably isn’t the best move.
They should have warned the users at least! And I don’t plan to setup a profile on Yahoo… already using Facebook which is great.
Yahoo has fundamentally changed their product. They are moving from a chat service to social networking. What is the key difference? Profiles are private now in the new system by default. Go make yourself a new profile all you want, but no one will see it unless you invite your friends to see it. A chat service wants to give people the opportunity to read profiles BEFORE a chat begins so you can decide if you want to talk to that person. A social networking site wants only your friends to be able to see who you are. That is what Yahoo wants to become. They think they are going to lure customers away from the existing social networking sites? Bwah ha ha ha………..
I like Yahoo! and interact on their Finance boards daily. I think this transition could have been handled better. Like their MyYahoo changes, they give you a chance to revert back to the old with gentle reminders about the new versions.
This was sloppy by comparison.
Lets all ditch yahoo if they dont care about us why should we support them. see if they can migrate the old profiles to get us back just before they go BUST
Is there anything that Yahoo have done that has actually been successful for any significant time? Ever since I first realised their approach to web search was to have people *manually* categorise web pages, I vowed I would never invest them. Thank god I remained true to my word. Yahoo are *almost* as terrible as AOL. And that’s saying something.
“Is there anything that Yahoo have done that has actually been successful for any significant time?”
The fact that they are still around for a long time shows that they are successful.
What a dumbass.
1) this whole project hinged on the incomprehensibly poor leadership of Jay Rossiter. He stands in rarefied air as one of the worst at Yhoo - an offensive cocktail of painfully arrogant and remarkably ignorant all in one.
2) can you fathom launching a profile page without photos? they own flickr! something like 50% of all facebook page views come from facebook photos. And yhoo thinks its a good idea to launch without photo integration?
Jerry needs to go - and take Jay with him - SOON.
Technically they don’t have to warn users about anything as far as their service is concerned. That is what terms are for. Read them. Sure, it is nice to have a heads up, but most of the sites I know of make it clear that changes can happen without warning.
My profile is up to date and i”ve not touched it in years.
Yet another anti-Yahoo post from Arrington? -Declare your holding in businesses before you post comments on them.
Social is very important and here to stay. Its obvious large internet entities are doing their best to figure out how to monetize the model. Ultimately, that’s the great potential of Facebook.
Yeah, but it seems like it is getting out of hand now. Especially with this Yahoo! move.
People ask “Who needs a profile?” and “Who reads a profile?” For one, I do and so does many many others. I worked for a company that spent bundles on a new program they said would work. It didn’t and could not work. The company went under. Is this an omen for Yahoo? Like many others, I will NOT create a new profile. Why create something that the powers that be can delete with the press of a button? I will hang on for a short while to see what Yahoo does. I doubt they will revert back to the old format becauuse they are wearing blinders.
All you hear on tv these days is the practice of safe sex. Apparently Yahoo does not believe in this thought. They have slipped one in the users and never used a condom. What kind of ogre will be the result of this act?
I rtealize Yahoo can do what they please with their system, but I also feel we should have been given a choice in the matter. The new or the old.
To the powers that be: I have read almost all of the user responses, and about 98% to 99 % have been negative. Now, do you want to retain your users or not? The ball is in your court.
P. S. OOPS! Isn’t that something a person says when they drop something? Either that or AWWWWWWWWW S–T!!
Anger, venting … Why?
Let’s remember that Yahoo has provided a relatively stable email service, free, for over 10 years. It’s still number one, globally.
We may not agree with their strategies and implementation; but let’s maintain a balance. Is the cup half full or half empty?
Profile consists of infantile questions: MOVIE, TV, BOOKS… huh? Who cares? I do not want OLD OLD OLD friends to find me. I NEED NEED NEED new friends. HOW in the world can new people find me? I have not dated in the last couple of years after Yahoo! wrecked the profile.
Yahoo seems to be going in reverse. I liked their Chat and groups very much about five years ago, but ever since then they have worked hard on innovating ways to loose me as a customer. It’s a shame because they “owned” the social web before we knew there was a social web.
hey great news profits down 1500 people lose their job( thats not good) somaybe they will start to listen.
I have no problem with Yahoo trying to be innovative and creative but that is not how I would characterize this move by Yahoo!. Frankly, I do not know what Yahoo is trying to do…but whatever it is, it is doing badly.