Yahoo! and their personal crusade to “sunset” me.
Yahoo was the first website I ever visited. My first real email was a Yahoo! email address. In 1997 I loved Yahoo! and everything it did. For many years it was the #1 company I wanted to work for.
Then somehow I pissed Yahoo! off and it became personal.
My very first website in a friendly welcoming place called Geoctities. I loved Geocities, I made lifelong friends there. Yahoo! learned this and bought it in 1999 taking their time, playing with me but eventually shutting Geocities down in 2009.
The crusade against me had started.
Yahoo! 1-0 mrjoe
I got my first tech job through Upcoming, back then the best place to find out about local meet ups. Yahoo! found that out and bought Upcoming spending the next 5 years slowly torturing and killing it before “sunsetting” it a few years ago.
Yahoo! 2 – 0 mrjoe
Being a tech early adopter I had a digital camera pretty early. It really came into it’s own when I uploaded my photos to Yahoo! photos to share. Yahoo! found out I was using the service and shut it down. Close but no cigar Yahoo! I had outsmarted them and moved to Flickr. Take that!
Yahoo! 2 – 1 mrjoe
Thinking I had out manouvered those Sunnyvale crazies but learning that I was on to them they bought Flickr and began to punish, torture and REEK! them for helping me out. Bastards.
Yahoo! 3 – 1 mrjoe
I’m an organised guy, but Yahoo! was on to me AGAIN, they went to the source of my knowledge; my bookmarks. I had been using a lovely site called Delicious to store my bookmarks. Yahoo! bought it and tried to kill it scaring me away to Pinboard in the process.
Yahoo! 4 – 1 mrjoe
Keeping organised I built a little tool to send me an SMS when my daily commuting train was late. I should have known, it was my fault they shut Yahoo! Pipes down.
Yahoo! 5 – 1 mrjoe
I wrote a book in 2013 and created a website with Tumblr. Then guess who bought Tumblr? Suddenly weird ads began appearing. A relentless personal pursuit.
Yahoo! 6 – 1 mrjoe
I thought it was all over, it is now
So here we are in 2016, I thought this personal crusade by the purple and yellow against me must be at an end. But no. The bastards just took it to a whole new level. My personal email was hacked. I don’t care about the passwords. But everything from 1997 onwards. Lists of contacts, answers to personal question and goodness knows what else.
Yahoo! 7 – 1 mrjoe
A bonus point for covering it up for the last 4 year (You couldn’t make this up).
Yahoo! 8 – 1 mrjoe
So you’ve beaten me Yahoo! You have wronged me eight times. How can this not be personal Yahoo? Just stop, give up, go home and and have a long hard think about what you’ve done.