Sunday, January 03, 2010

What happend to Yahoo profiles?

Before there was MySpace and Facebook there was Yahoo Profiles, the first large scale personal directory on the Internet. Yahoo deleted all the photos in the profiles when they bought Flickr. Then they deleted all the old text in the Yahoo profiles in favor of their new Yahoo 360 which had more social networking features. Yahoo 360 was killed in 2009. No one wanted to add text and photos to any yahoo media since Yahoo had no track record of maintaining what they had in the past. Now Yahoo Profiles are back and are still empty of text and photos, who would bother to add material that was deleted by the company entrusted with it the first time?

Lesson:
All it takes is a few bad decisions to go from number one to not being a player at all. If customers don't see their material archived, they won't bother to contribute content.