The Yahoo That Yang Doesn’t Want Us To Have
Yahoo – the company that we all love to hate but not because of the people working at the company. Rather it is because of the totally insane actions of the company’s management – especially the upper management and boardroom. It is a management that seems bent and determined to run around like a bunch of fools without a single coherent thought as to what Yahoo should be doing.
Through it all, the developers and other people we never even really see behind the scenes at the company keep on trying to do their damnedest to keep Yahoo relevant and innovative. Sure, sometimes their ideas seem to be more me-too than something new as witnessed by Mesh and Yahoo 360; but even with that they have brought us cool stuff.
Stuff like Yahoo Piped, Yahoo BOSS and now as posted by Dare Obasanjo Yahoo is rolling out what they are calling a universal profile. As a part of your Yahoo profile you can now elect to
Allow my connections to share my information labeled “My Connections” with third-party applications they install and developers who made the applications.Learn More
The item in question is the text circled in red in the graphic (click on it for a larger view) but this feature according to Dare has Yahoo letting users to opt-in and allow an application being used by as member of their social network to access their personal information. As Dare points out
This is a very user-centric approach and avoids the draconian practice of services like Facebook that get around this issue by not providing any personally idenitifable user information via their APIs. Instead a user can specify which pieces of their personal information they don’t mind being accessed by 3rd party applications being used by their friends using the option above. Nicely done.
The great thing here is that even while the Yahoo stock is acting like a see-saw and Yang and Decker are playing ring around the rosie, there are still people at Yahoo who are passionate about providing the people using Yahoo with interesting tools and services. Even though the majority of workers at the company might not know when they are going to be asked to hand over their badges, they keep on being passionate about Yahoo and its users.
This is the Yahoo that a great number of people on the web remember and have been saddened by the company’s decline into insignificance. This is the type of dynamic and incredibly talented company that Yang and Decker are destroying and that is just plain wrong.
[image courtesy of Dare Obasanjo]
