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Only thing I ever found useful(and still do) is Yahoo Finance.
Guessing you’re young / missed the beginning of the net, because that’s when yahoo was king.
no mention of Yahoo Pipes?
> “We didn’t want to call it a portal, because a portal is a door to somewhere else, and we wanted people to stay there,” says Shannon Brayton, a senior manager in Yahoo’s corporate communications department from 1998 to 2001. Of course the company that eventually killed them, Google, found its earliest success by explicitly rejecting this ethos. Google was a search engine, they didn't care if it sent you away; they…
... only seems obvious in hindsight, though. I worked for a string of internet companies in the late 90's back when people were still trying to figure out what an internet company was supposed to be. The biggest task that they consistently put on me, the tech guy who actually understood what "internet" meant, was making sure that users didn't use too much of the company's internet, because internet was expensive. When I first heard of MySpace, I was floored - they're just letting people upload stuff to their servers? Like... whatever they want? As often as they want? They don't charge each individual user by the individual byte? This was heresy! (And then I checked to see if they were hiring...)
Wow. I didn't know about Yahoo! Music. That was definitely a service ahead of its time. I can see why it failed in the early 2000s (less trust in internet transactions, slower bandwidth) but it's basically the same service that Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, etc, offer nowadays.
Did I love that service...
I think the connection run strong - I'd go as far as saying that Yahoo and AOL failed for the same reason. To survive at their inflated valuations they had to be everything to everyone, which stretched their vision thin. Meanwhile, it was always impossible to do everything, so smaller, more agile players came in and etched away at their business models.
They never seemed to ask the question, "Why do people use Yahoo in the first place?".
IT's amazing that something so simple as a not having a clear vision/mission could take down a successful company but that's the essentially what happened at Yahoo! When I worked there in 2004 it was just confused, chasing competitors and ideas, never deciding on what it wanted to be when it grew up. I left a year or so later and from what I saw it never figured itself out. I always wanted the company to focus on a m…