5 Reasons We Still Like Yahoo!

Yahoo! hasn’t had any positive news in a long time. And today didn’t help. Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, during an interview at the Web 2.0 Summit conference admitted that his company would love for Microsoft to buy them, even though they straight up said, “Hell to the nah!” to their offers months earlier. Tough break. But despite all the negative press, everyone’s former favorite search engine is still chugging along in 2nd place. Google may have American pon lock, but Yahoo! is still the most visited website in the world.

That got us thinking, Yahoo! isn’t all that bad. There are a few things we still like about the company. Yes, they’ve made some colossal screw ups like not buying Google when they had the chance, or not buying Facebook when they had the chance, or not letting Microsoft scoop ‘em up. But there are a few things within Yahoo! that we think are worth fighting for…

YAHOO! MAIL

Yes, they were behind the curve when it came to Ajax powered email and outlandish storage sizes, but when they finally did upgrade their mail offering, they blew the doors off with a bevy of upgrades that made most other web based email services look straight up archaic. In addition to a new interface that looks more desktop software than web-based, Yahoo! added a bunch of other desktop-esque features like the ability to drag and drop your email and contacts into folders and the ability to use keyboard shortcuts.

FLICKR

What started out as a add-on tool for a multi-player game called Game Neverending has become one turned into the most popular photo organizing and sharing services on the ‘Net. Real talk: If you don’t use it yourself, we’re pretty sure you’ve looked at someone’s photos through it.

YAHOO! ANSWERS

Believe it or not, there are some things Google can’t answer. For those inquires, we find Yahoo! Answers works great. A community driven site, all you do after you register is enter a question and members will usually quickly hit you back with what they believe to be the right answers. The only bad part is that the community is made up of mainstream users, so you will sometimes get answers that aren’t really answers. But wrong answers usually spark debate within the community which is always a good thing.

YAHOO! WIDGETS

Before Apple and Microsoft offered their own widget programs with their respective operating systems, there was Konfabulator, a program that let you run small, lightweight programs called widgets that display specific information. When Yahoo! acquired them in 2005, they stripped away the $19.95 price tag, and gave it to the people for free. Sure, it’s just another platform for Yahoo to push their many services, but getting a program that works better than Dashboard for $Free.99 is undoubtedly dope.

YAHOO! MUSIC

Perhaps our favorite Yahoo! site, Yahoo! Music offers everything from music news, upcoming concerts, music videos to the ability to create your own video playlists and radio stations. Through their partnership with Pepsi they offer special live performances. They also are known for cool add-ons like FoxyTunes which allows you to control your media player from your Firefox browser.