Thanks to Microsoft's impartial, faceless, non-responsive, we-really-don't-give-a-shit-what-you-think attitude; other companies like Google, Facebook, MySpace and Yahoo have followed suit.
I remember when Yahoo was a list of links that came as an email. Actually, I was keeping a list of places way before the Stanford wah-hoos were doing it. My world wide web experience started in Nov 1991. Yeah we had NeXT machines at our office.
At least Yahoo has a contact us page that really works; you can actually contact someone. Google, Facebook, and others have a Contact Us page that has no link or place where you can actually contact anyone; even if their site is messing up. They have forums where you can gripe about things, but they are run people that are not part of the organization.
I don't know which is worse. Not being able to contact someone or having a company, like Yahoo, that allows you to contact them; they give you a feel good "yeah we agree with what you are saying ... blah ... blah ... blah" response that makes you feel like "hey" they really listened to what you had to say and then they do like the politicians ... nothing.
After the third time you have gotten the feel good "Lip Service" and nothing has changed then you realize it's just PR.
Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc., have gotten too big.
My gripe, which I will explain in a minute, is how Yahoo changed their wonderful Box Office Resource to a cheesy top ten list.
Even if all of the people who agreed with me on this all stopped using Yahoo at the same time, they wouldn't even notice the difference; so why should they care? ... If it is not impacting the bottom line then they really don't have to care or do anything. All they have to do is make you THINK that they are going to do something. Pacification. Put the pacifier in the baby's mouth ... they'll forget about the problem or will give up after a few days.
I found a reference to this at the Internet Archives. I had to go back pretty far because no Yahoo refuses to allow their content to be archived. PIGS!
Notice the archived charts. You used to be able to do an historical view. You could go back; see when a movie entered the list and then track it for several weeks. In the second picture you can see that they listed way more than 10 movies like they do now. Back then I complained about how they sorted the column headings. Most sites that do this, or Explorer on your computer will toggle the sort when you select the top of a column. Yahoo's only performed the sort once per column. You had to select a different column before you could reselect the column you were on.
Twice I complained that it would be simple to add that feature. Twice I got this great response telling me we think that that is a great idea. ... yeah it was so great that they never implemented it.
When Yahoo switched to their new format the old Box Office was replaced by a top ten list.
Twice I complained about this; please bring back the old Box Office. Oh yeah, we think that this is a great idea you have. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. Blah, blah, blah, blah blah!
More "Lip Service from the Yahoo PIGS saying how they're going to make it better. I am not holding my breath.
If I had twenty million followers Yahoo might take notice. Nobody gives a crap what I say, I don't have one comment for anything I've written.
They took a great resource and trashed it.
In the end Yahoo is just like Microsoft. If it is not a hot button item for them then they just idle through it.
They've gotten lazy.
It is a little too much work to implement that feature and since that is not a big priority it probably will never get put back the way it was.
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