Product Pulse – January 30, 2009

Posted January 30th, 2009 at 11:14 pm by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor

 6 Comments / Filed in: Product Pulse

I’m not making this up — according to a variety of calendar-conscious websites, today is Yodel for Your Neighbors Day. So get out your lederhosen, head to the McMillan’s front porch, and let out your best yodelayeehoo. Unfortunately, there’s no guidance on what happens next, though I’d imagine it involves sprinting. Here’s what we belted out this week:

• Classic Mail gets chatty: If you’re a Yahoo! Mail Classic diehard but long for some of the less retro features of the new Yahoo! Mail, the product team has your compromise. They’ve just unveiled two chatty features that will be rolled out to mailboxes over the next few months. You’ll be able to send instant messages and SMS messages to your Yahoo! contacts right from the mail interface. Your contact list will highlight who’s online and who’s mobile so you can get to them faster than email (remember when we thought faxes were fast?). Read more on the Mail and Messenger blogs.
• Bye-bye Briefcase: We’ve decided to discontinue Yahoo! Briefcase, effective March 30th. When it was born nearly ten years ago, it saw great usage, but that’s been declining over the years as people turned to places like Yahoo! Mail (unlimited storage, yeah!) and Flickr, both of which make it easier to share things. We know that’s disappointing to those of you who still rely on it, but discontinuing Yahoo! Briefcase lets us focus on the products that are more broadly used. Please, please remove your files before March 30th as you won’t be able to access them thereafter — we wouldn’t want you to lose anything.
• Year of the ox: There’s nothing quite like the guilty pleasure of checking a horoscope. And this week, you need to make that a Chinese horoscope. In honor of the Lunar New Year, the team at Yahoo! Shine has pulled together this overview of what the year of the ox will bring to oxen (as well as goats, pigs, rats, monkeys, etc.). Gong hei fat choi!

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Tagged: Product Pulse, Yahoo! Briefcase, yahoo! mail, yahoo! shine

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6 Comments Add your own

gag | January 31st, 2009 at 3:37 pm

i am not serious but why cant i view mails in my search

also people now dont want to go through the trouble of storing and keeping tab of things hence external or public storage with a tag would be useful where the user is prompted to store only if below a value

why cant we mail a keyword with search box and a short note as a email
-then the user can search and read about the keyword and make sense more from the short note

i would like to work for yahoo! and give some ideas for search and profiles, hire me asap please

Floyd | January 31st, 2009 at 7:50 pm

Am I reading this right, you are forcing chat on Classic Ymail users now? Good grief. I hope you show us how to opt out of yet another unwanted change. Unless you make these features optional, all you are doing is alienating your audience. Again. Still.

Tim | February 2nd, 2009 at 12:08 pm

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• Receive Files using Dropbox Links
• View All Kinds of Documents and Pictures Online
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• Supports Windows, Mac, IPhone, Mobile
• Search Content, Define Custom MetaData
• SSL, Secure FTP, HTTPS WebDAV, Blowfish
• Add SubAccounts to Create Workgroups/Teams
• Version History with Checkin-Checkout
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• Private Sites for Businesses

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Enjoy,
Tim

Nicki Dugan | February 3rd, 2009 at 11:44 am

@Floyd: No forcing happening here! You can choose not to use the IM functionality in Yahoo! Mail Classic. When you sign in and see that the feature is available in your account, just click the status menu (which should say “Available”) and select “Sign out of chat.” This will take you offline from the instant message network. This setting will persist from session to session so when you log out of Mail and back in, you’ll still be signed out from chat.

Lorenzo | February 3rd, 2009 at 7:01 pm

If people are still using classic, as I usually do, it’s sad because that’s a reflection on how the new mail is still so early in beta. give me my apps and such now or don’t bother giving it to anyone. Briefcase closing? Yeah, I used it. I wish they would have just upped the store capacity because now that is the “it” thing for most sites. Microsoft has SkyDrive and Google is rumored to have a GDrive coming soon so it naturally makes sense Yahoo would go in the opposite direction of progress and delete yet another of their properties instead of expand on it. No wonder Yahoo’s failing. sigh. I sure miss what Yahoo was and what it could have been, had they been a true social network of services about 5 years ago. Windows Live here I come.

Alex | February 4th, 2009 at 8:56 am

Actually, the feature is of little value to the Classic Mail users, as those who want a rich client have switched to the “All-New Mail”, and the rest of us just want our screens to be left alone. We would much rather appreciate an announcement that the bugs that have plagued the updated Classic since the day of the rollout are at least being worked on. (i’m not just talking about feature reduction and horrid spam filtration, but things like search not working past certain date and codepage processing severely misbehaving). Customer service does not reply to questions related to these issues, and the new gentleman in charge of ymailblog, Andrew Molyneux, has not responded to a single comment from hundreds of unhappy users of both the free and the Plus service. Last time we had any response was months ago, back when Ryan Knight was the Community Manager, but still, no improvement. Patience is running out for many of us, and i have started switching my respondents away from my yahoo contact – which is no small task – i have been using my address since mid-1998, ever since the service was started. I am really surprised to see Yahoo showing so little care facing a mass customer exodus. Please tell me i’m missing something. Am I?