We’ve always had a soft-spot for Yahoo!. It was one of the first brands on the block that made the tangled-up world wide web a bit more user-friendly. It was our first email address, or at least one of the few email addresses that is still around today (anyone still have a Lycos account?). And of course they had one of the iconic dot-com ad campaigns, and one of the very few that survived the bursting Internet bubble. After each bizarre yet poignant commercial you were asked “do you Yahoo!?” and despite the confusing punctuation we enthusiastically replied “Yes!”
See one of our favorites here:
Do You Yahoo!?
But years of missteps for Yahoo! have led them astray and highlighted their internal identity crisis. Rather than “do you Yahoo!?”, these days it’s more like, “who are you Yahoo!?” For regular users of Yahoo! you’ve probably noticed a new feature called “status-casting.” Essentially it gives users the opportunity to say what they’re doing. It probably sounds familiar because it is years overdue…and remember, this is the Internet we’re talking about, where years can often equate the lifecycle of a company, a service, or trend. This follows Google Mail which has allowed users to set their own statuses, Facebook which does the same, and Twitter which basically only does this. The real kick in the gut is that AOL added this feature a month before Yahoo!. In the pecking order of Internet properties nobody wants to be following AOL.
We applaud the attempt to differentiate by creating a unique name – “status-casting.” But if you’re offering a new take on the name, how about a new take on the activity. For example, surely not all updates are created equal and a creative approach could take advantage of this. From our experience there’s a wide range of updates…some are rants, some are questions, some are jokes, some are urgent, and some certainly are not. What if there was a way to differentiate these updates so they can be categorized or get different placement on a user’s news feed? There’s no shortage of innovation possibilities…if only Yahoo! had taken the time to develop one instead of giving the world one loud, unfortunate status update “Do you still need Yahoo!?”