In the past year, we have seen a few Yahoo! sites/applications disappear (Yahoo! auctions, now Yahoo! podcasts and there are probably a few others) and we have seen a lot of controversy surrounding certain Yahoo! properties (Flickr). We have seen a review of Yahoo!’s Internet radio application (LaunchCast) here on CN and a review of the new My Yahoo! beta on the HTMLCenter blog.

The same issue keeps rising to the surface in each of these incidents/posts: Yahoo! doesn’t seem to care about you (especially if you are not using a standard, out-of-the-box Microsoft-based computer). Many of their applications take a crap when you try to use them in anything but IE, their tech support seems to be consistently on vacation (occasionally you receive an automated response, but it rarely contains a solution or even an estimated time of repair) and their Web site is really not set up for anyone but IE users with a decent display. Forget about trying to use Yahoo!’s properties if you are using a mobile browser.

The funny thing is that once upon a time, Yahoo! was a huge collection of links ‘curated’ by people at Yahoo! All set in to nice categories etc. rather like DMOZ.

I’ve been building a similar model over at podcast.com, whicch as well as being a huge podcast search engine, also allows members to build their own directories of feeds – letting them tag them too and build playlists to share as rss too.

It’s taxomony PLUS folksonomy. There’s open OPML dta for every folder in the system for people to build their own verison of iTunes o the data, if they so wish. Mobile UIs too.

We’re just about to throw open the doors to the beta.

Fun times ahead! :)

Cheers!
Kosso