Keeping Yahoo! from Becoming Old News...

In a recent New York Times article, it discussed a recent speech by Jerry Yang, a co-founder of Yahoo!, in which he said that, unfortunately, Yahoo! has not yet obtained the new look everyone's looking for. Over the years, Yahoo! has become a complex network that an extremely large number of people use to communicate to one another, with new features such as Yahoo! groups, certain developers' programs, and others, but of course, its very popular search engine is still up and running.

Yahoo! now is starting to develop a plan with which it intends to beat out many of its biggest competitors, namely Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. It wants to reach out all over the Web to outside applications and other sites, to gain more internet traffic. "'The goal,' Mr. Yang said, 'is to turn Yahoo into a primary online “starting point” for consumers.'" As Yahoo! gradually begins to seem like it is likely to start losing popularity, and consumers, investers start to question whether or not their investments truly are a good idea. Yahoo! is still the most popular property on the Web, but certain sites, like Google, beat out Yahoo! in number of searches performed by a long shot. Google has even developed a counter to MyYahoo!, known as iGoogle, allowing viewers to personalize their homepages and, of course, boosting popularity. Many of the people who work at Yahoo! say that they should still offer basic features, like search, email, and instant messaging, yet people like Liz Lufkin have organized new features, like the "today module", which displays new information that coincides with recent trends in searches and other hot topics on the Web. An important aspect of this is its outreach to third party websites, which many consider problematic, while many say it could help boost popularity. Overall, many new features in the future of Yahoo! are promising, yet will they help?

Personally, I believe these new changes are essential to the development of such a website. Its outreach to other sites will definitely boost its popularity, as Yahoo! will be affiliated with more sites and will hence be visited more often. I believe its new features will also make it more popular in our world of speed-communication, and its search engine will simply prove another additional asset to its ranking in cyber-popularity. In general, I believe Yahoo! has a bright future, yet it must be quick to make these very important changes for its own benefit, and that of its consumers and investers.