Now that they've stopped Picking, maybe it'll heal

January 3, 2008 2:06 PM

It feels like the Death of My Internet Childhood. After attempting to identify "the best of the web" since August 1995, Yahoo! has stopped updating its Yahoo! Picks, preferring to showcase its airheaded-video-based The 9 (for those who can't count all the way to 10).

For historical reference, here is their annualized best of 1996, 1997 (part 1, part 2) when they said "Thanks to all six of you for reading..." (and I was one of them), 1998 (part 1, part 2), 1999 (part 1, part 2), "the Millennium", 2000 (part 1, part 2), 2001 (part 1, part 2), (nothing in 2002 when they changed from a weekly digest to one pick per day) 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007.

For the record, yes, I subscribed to the dead-tree magazine Yahoo! Internet Life and still occasionally reference a MyYahoo homepage. I am so-o-o 1998.

posted by wendell (24 comments total)

Frodo will love it.
posted by cog_nate at 2:21 PM on January 3, 2008

Good thing the High Five award is still...going...er.
posted by maxwelton at 2:28 PM on January 3, 2008

Oh man, I haven't thought about Yahoo Internet Life in forever.

Also, remember Internet World? It came with a serrated card that listed all of the URLs in the magazine.
posted by roll truck roll at 2:42 PM on January 3, 2008

Thirty years from now, we're going to be chuckling about how back in the early days of the Holonet, you could subscribe to blogs that would include a bulleted list of holoports you could slice into.

Chuckling brains in jars.
posted by cortex at 2:45 PM on January 3, 2008 [3 favorites]

Ya who?
posted by loquacious at 2:54 PM on January 3, 2008

Yahoo seriously started to suck quite a while ago. They constantly feature total garbage on their main page like the latest doin's of Paris Hilton, and then list the top ten searches that so happily coincide with whatever crapulence they were highlighting at the time.
posted by 45moore45 at 3:01 PM on January 3, 2008

Tell your children that in the days before Altavista or Google, we had to categorize our links by hand. There was also a giant button that did nothing...
posted by broady at 3:03 PM on January 3, 2008

Who's going to throw in the towel next, memepool?
posted by bobo123 at 3:07 PM on January 3, 2008 [3 favorites]

You know what's weird - I came across a site hosted on Tripod yesterday. People still host on Tripod! Strange but true. And the messed up little bar Tripod inserts at the top of hosted pages contained links to "Post to del.icio.us", "Post to Digg"...!

I figured Tripod was, by now, just some old server in a back room somewhere that someone had forgotten to unplug, but it seems they've done their darned hardest to jump on Web2.0. How quaint.
posted by Jimbob at 3:11 PM on January 3, 2008

I remember when the mods just deleted posts instead of tasing us over the Internet.
posted by lukemeister at 3:11 PM on January 3, 2008

Who's going to throw in the towel next, memepool?

Mirsky told me they're probably not going to be around for too much longer.....
posted by Challahtronix at 3:18 PM on January 3, 2008

I've been hearing some ugly rumors about suck.com, too.

*tazes lukemeister*
posted by cortex at 3:20 PM on January 3, 2008

1998
ColorMix - allows Web designers to expand on the 216-color Netscape palette by combining two or even three "Web-safe" hues. (Featured August 17)

Ahh, Netscape and "web-safe palettes." Good times.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 3:20 PM on January 3, 2008

Internet World was great when it was still a subscription-only almost-a-trade-magazine publication. It "jumped the shark" when I could buy it off the rack at the local grocery store.

What I really miss is Omni.
posted by mrbill at 3:42 PM on January 3, 2008

Mirsky told me they're probably not going to be around for too much longer.....

Sad face. I stopped by recently and it did look like the pace had slowed way down from their heyday.

I miss Spy.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 3:46 PM on January 3, 2008

Yahoo seriously started to suck quite a while ago. They constantly feature total garbage on their main page like the latest doin's of Paris Hilton, and then list the top ten searches that so happily coincide with whatever crapulence they were highlighting at the time.

I work for Yahoo!, but not in this area, so I don't have anything other than speculation based on the area I work in...but I would assume it's the other way around, that the top ten searches by the users drives the content that was pulled to prominence on the main page. In short, if users are searching for Paris Hilton, Paris Hilton stories might be weighted for main page display.
posted by davejay at 4:50 PM on January 3, 2008

Chuckling brains in jars.

I have no idea how this linkage happened in my brain, but somehow that phrase made me think "Jingle Bells", so:

Thirty years from now
Chuckling brains in jars
Slicing holoports
Metafilter bound
Chuckling 'bout the past
before the Holonet
What fun it is to reminisce
How lame old Yahoo was.

(chorus)
Chuckling brains, Chuckling brains,
Chuckle in your jars;
Oh! what fun it is to slice
in to MeFi's holonet.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:14 PM on January 3, 2008 [2 favorites]

your internet childhood has been refranchised to Wells Fargo or Wal-Mart.
posted by mrgrimm at 6:41 PM on January 3, 2008

Yeah, Yahoo™ bashing is all in , and everything, (I used to snort in derision at those who called Yahoo a "search engine") but I do enjoy their free Fantasy Football and there are some pretty cool Groups that I subscribe to (like Artisan Cheesemakers and CometChasing). Haven't thought about Y.I.L. magazine for years.

And wendell: in time they'll (no doubt) be back to thanking "all 6" of their readers.
posted by spock at 7:59 PM on January 3, 2008

For reasons that have never been clear to me, I somehow got a free subscription to Yahoo Internet Life, at least for a while. I think it must have been after its heyday, though, since I don't remember being particularly impressed. Ah, well, I must have missed it when it was cool; story of my life.

The last real old-school niche geek magazine that I'm crossing my fingers and hoping never dies is Circuit Cellar. It's still pretty hardcore.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:31 PM on January 3, 2008

I'll miss Yahoo! Picks -- a site I'd visit on weekends. I'll miss it like Suck and so many others!
posted by ericb at 8:44 PM on January 3, 2008

Yahoo jumped the shark the day they turned their very simple, very useful TV listings into whatever-in-the-hell you call the current monstrosity. Fuck Youhoo.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:28 PM on January 3, 2008

I hear they cancelled Cello, too.
posted by dhartung at 9:31 PM on January 3, 2008

Probably shouldn't mention the Netscape 'What's Cool' link has gone corporate.

'sides I find all the cool sites on Marimba.

and you Cortex are nothing but a crack-smoking Canadian squirrel!
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 11:44 PM on January 3, 2008