Yahoo! Unchanged

Yahoo is worse than a drug. It is so harmful because it is so convenient and fun. I have wasted hundreds perhaps thousands of hour surfing the Internet, reading news stories about things that don't matter at all, and playing stupid games on the pestilence that is Yahoo!. Yahoo! also hasn't changed much and continues to be the addicting time waster that it has always been. Web theory: an introduction by Robert Burnett and P. David Marshall analyses the web and uses Yahoo! as a case study. Their analysis was first published in 2003 about seven years ago (p. iv), but their summary of Yahoo! is just as correct now as it was then. They claim that Yahoo! is dominated by text and these text are meant to categorize (p. 97). To this extend they are correct. They also claim that Yahoo! has a grey background (p. 97). This is incorrect today because Yahoo! now has a white background.

Burnett and Marshall claim that Yahoo! tries to promote a spirit of freedom and enthusiasm (p. 96), and this is obviously true especially when you look at the image to the left. These authors also claim that Yahoo! is a site dominated by hyperlinks which lead the user to other pages (p. 97). This is true because Yahoo! is not only covered by blue text that carries the user from news to games to e-mail and to searches, but there are even icons we users can click to get these same options.

In my mind I tried to compare Yahoo! to something that is digital but this is so difficult because Yahoo! does so much. It is like a newspaper, a dictionary, a telephone, and a game room. The visual themes of Yahoo! may have changed a little but it is pretty much the same and is just as addictive.

1. Burnett, Robert and P. David Marshall. Web Theory: an introduction. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.