yahoo Archive

I am a happy Yahoo Mail user. I’ve been a Yahoo Mail user since the early days. I also know that I am a bad tech blogger and early adopter because I don’t use (and make love to) Gmail. I regularly get noogies at tech conferences when others learn about my choice.

Lately I’ve noticed issues with email delivery to my Yahoo Mail account. Sometimes emails are delivered on time, but many are delivered late. And the delayed delivery seems to vary – I can’t put my finger on it. Even the exact same email can be delivered in real-time on one test but another test takes half a day to arrive.  At first I thought it was only emails coming from Rackspace servers as they noted there was an issue a couple of weeks ago with mail delivery. But this past week, the delayed email delivery seems to be coming from all sides.

One interesting note – mail that gets forwarded from my gMail account always seems to come immediately. The same message sent directly to my Yahoo Mail account sometimes is delayed.

Yesterday it caused an issue as newer emails showed up before the previous emails which made for a very odd exchange with a client.

Do you use Yahoo Mail? If so, have you noticed any delivery delays over the past few weeks?

This weekend Yahoo is hosting the Open Hack event in NYC. The event brings together Yahoo developers and the public to learn what Yahoo has to offer developers as we all build our applications and startups. The Open Hack will run throughout the night as well – and they have provided a dop bag with toothpaste, mouthwash, etc. to stay clean.

If you read CN regularly, you know that I always do my best to grab schwag for all of you that couldn’t make it to the event. I was able to grab the following:

• sheets of stickers as seen below – there are so many stickers on each sheet that I am going to cut the sheets in half so more of you can have them
• a tshirt – I went with Women’s Medium size

If you’d like either of the above, send your address to general-at-centernetworks-d-o-t-com. I will ship anywhere in the world. The stickers are first come first serve and the tshirt winner will be randomly selected on Monday.

Yahoo is bringing their “Open Hack” developer conference to NYC next weekend. The Open Hack will be held on October 9th and 10th. Yahoo says they are still accepting registrations although they manually approve each person. There’s a wiki with more information about agenda, location and speakers.

Here’s Yahoo’s description of Hack Days: “Yahoo! Hack Days started back in 2005, when a team of engineers designed an event to see what sort of interesting and innovative applications people would build using Yahoo! tools and technologies over a 24-hour period. At the end of the day, they presented working hacks to roomful of colleagues and peers. Since then, “hack” has become an integral part of culture at Yahoo!. ”

The sessions run through the night and you can nap at the conference center. They say there will be lots of “geek food” – let’s just hope they don’t bring any Twitter cupcakes – we all know how those ended up for me :)

I am hoping we will learn why we should use Yahoo tools and developer platforms over their Google counterparts.

NY-based file sharing service Drop.io has announced a new partnership with Yahoo today. The partnership brings a new application named “Attach Large Files” directly as part of the applications menu within Yahoo Mail.

When you want to attach a file up to 100mb to a Yahoo email, the Attach Large File app creates a drop.io share, uploads the file to it, and attaches a link to the drop.io share inside of the email. In my testing, the application worked well.

The drop.io team notes that the app was built on top of the drop.io API. The app is a default and is available directly in the “applications” menu inside of Yahoo Mail. While I don’t see using the service for uploading a simple image or Word doc, for larger videos or photos it could work very well. And the offering should provide more visibility for drop.io to a mainstream audience.

Here’s a video overview of how the Attach Large Files application works:
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The big news last week was the partnership that Yahoo and Microsoft entered into. Paul McDougall noted, “Microsoft’s search tools will appear on Yahoo’s sites while Yahoo takes on sales role.”

Sometime last month the default “server not found” page that my ISP provides seemed to change again. The page says it’s powered by Yahoo Search. But after a handful of tests over the weekend, it seems like it’s more a page of ads than anything else. I showed the page to a couple of “regular” Internet users and both were confused as to the provided results. Most people today know that ads on search are separated from the organic results.

What I was provided with by my ISP is some sort of combined ads and organic search results into one result set. In fact on some searches, organic results were nowhere to be found on the first page. What makes this even more odd is that the numbering for the results continues from the paid “sponsored” ads to the organic results.  

Here are a few examples (click to view larger images):
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I’ve been a happy Yahoo Mail user forever and to the best of my memory, I don’t ever remember the service being down. As of 7pm Eastern this evening, Yahoo Mail has not been functioning. The few times that I’ve received an error, a simple browser refresh fixes the issue – but not this time. The error message remains even when switching over to the very old “classic” version of Yahoo Mail.

There are lots of people on Twitter who have also had issues accessing the mail service.

As always, please report in if Yahoo Mail is down for you.

Update: 7:45pm – it appears Yahoo Mail is back to normal.

German-based Jimdo has put out a call to all Geocities users…a lifeboat if you will. Jimdo launched in 2007 and currently has a staff of 30.  The service offers an easy way to create a website and the company says that no technical skills are required.

Their “lifeboat” is a new offering they are near completion on which will allow Geocities users to transfer their sites into Jimdo. The basic Jimdo service is free and you can upgrade to JimdoPro for $5/month. JimdoPro offers more detailed statistics, larger storage space, personalized domain name, and no ads.

They are offering Geocities’ (and Google Pages) users 10% off the JimdoPro fee. This is a smart move for Jimdo as it makes them look like heros for helping users of a system that is closing.