New My Yahoo Signals It Has Abandoned the Geeks
Does anyone among the tech influential spend any significant time on Yahoo anymore? I sure don't and for years I did. I have a couple of their news feeds, but for the most part it seems like all the action is on Google and a bunch of startups.
Context & Ripple Effects
The My Yahoo beta lands two years after bloggers were already calling Yahoo's map redesign doomed, so the 'abandoned the geeks' critique is less a single reaction than a recurring verdict on how Yahoo ships consumer products. The pickup was unusually broad for a portal refresh: Read/WriteWeb covered it twice the same day and TechCrunch carried it too.
The sharpest detail is who answered: Read/WriteWeb ran a response from the former My Yahoo chief, now CEO of start-page startup Pageflakes — a rival founder critiquing the product he used to run. Steve Rubel's framing at Micro Persuasion is that the tech-influencer audience barely spends time on Yahoo anymore, with their attention settled on Google and a cluster of startups.
First-order effects
- Yahoo's redesigned My Yahoo optimizes for mainstream personalization rather than configurable power-user tools, formally writing off the geek audience that once anchored the product.
- Pageflakes and comparable start-page startups get an open lane: their own credibility is amplified by an ex-My Yahoo boss publicly critiquing Yahoo's direction.
Second-order effects
- As influencers like Rubel route their reading through Google and startup services instead, Yahoo loses the earned-media and developer-sentiment layer that shapes which platforms the wider web adopts next.
- Every Yahoo release framed as consumer-first hands competitors a free contrast story — the Read/WriteWeb and TechCrunch coverage of this beta did more for start-page alternatives than for the portal itself.
Third-order effects
- If Yahoo keeps optimizing for default mass-market experiences, it consolidates around media-company positioning while the technical early-adopter layer migrates to Google and startups — a structural split between portals built for everyone and tools built for the people who build the web.
The trend: Mid-2000s consumer web products are splitting into polished mass-market portals and configurable tools for technical early adopters, and Yahoo's My Yahoo relaunch marks its choice of the former.