If ever you want proof of why Yahoo! is a shadow of its former self, you only have to look at Mybloglog.com, which Yahoo! bought a while back. I used to really like mybloglog, I liked Eric who founded the company too, and we spent a good time emailing back and forth about new features and bugs and stuff. The service was great back then, it worked and offered real value and the tech support was ace.

Then Yahoo! bought it and the rot set in. Right now I still use it out of habit really, but the fact that I pay them for the privilege of running a steadily eroding service sucks. I emailed them a couple of months back pointing out a couple of bugs and saying that the reporting function doesn’t work properly. I got back some stupid big company message asking me to give them my domain name which I already had given. They then had the gall to send me a questionnaire to ask whether I was satisfied with the service (what service people?) and then followed up with another big company form message along the lines of  ‘thank you for your report, we value your custom’. No fix though. Sheesh!

Currently the service is broken for me in a number of places. It no longer shows clicks on links, the reports are still broken, there’s one important tracking feature missing, and the show top 10 is broken. Oh but they’ve just introduced some facile new community feature which is totally useless and won’t be any benefit to anyone except the team that wrote the code. No wonder Yahoo! just fired a whole design department. I used to really like Yahoo! too.

It’s a real shame when a great service gets trodden into the ground by big company ineptitude, and even worse when they’re still charging customers for the privilege. Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo!, IBM, it’s a disease, isn’t it? It’ll be interesting to see how Google gets on over time. Sad, sad, sad…