Yahoo has never figured out who their customer is and, consequently, has never been able to keep their customers satisfied. Google made clear not long ago that their customer is the guy who pays for the advertising. Their entire focus is and has been all about keeping that customer satisfied. Yahoo needs to spend less time, effort, and money building traffic that has no monetary value to advertisers, and more time, effort, and money building valuable traffic for their advertisers.

Facebook has the same problem, the difference is, they know it. They have tons of traffic, but nobody is there for the purpose of spending money. Consequently, the advertising on the site is not much different from shotgun junk mail. Unlike Yahoo, Facebook is working overtime trying to figure out how to get people to respond to their advertisers. I doubt they'll succeed. Facebook has all the same problems as Yahoo's Friendster and Myspace. Eventually, anyone with a credit card will tire of it and move on, leaving only 7th graders playing games for free (Friendsters current state) and posting nonsense about who wore what to school.

Google is so successful simply because people with credit cards go there to find what they want (to buy). It's an advertiser's dream. Yahoo determined their future the day they shut down their search engine. Had they invested in delivering the best search results possible and fraud free clicks for their advertisers, the public would have a choice in search today and Yahoo wouldn't be in its current state of demise.

This layoff is only the beginning of the end. A vision of the future. Yahoo has yet to learn who their customer is. When they do that, then, maybe, they might have a chance at survival, but I doubt it. They still think traffic and registered members is what it's all about.

Almost everyone running a website, including me, has run into problems with spamhaus. Spammers change IP addresses and move on. Spamhaus does not monitor their block list to determine whether an IP is no longer a source of spam. The result is, every time I upgrade my server, being assigned a new IP address, I must once again lose hours of my time appealing to Spamhaus and their ISPs to unblock my IP address. Well, I'm done with it.

My website publishes public information. Every month, thousands of business owners create an account so they can update the information related to their business. When an account is created, my system sends a verification email. If that email is blocked, the business owner is unable to activate the account and, consequently, can not update their information. Currently, that is exactly what happens to everyone in ATT territory (everyone in several southern states). And as far as I'm concerned, it's not my problem. They chose ATT, which chose to use an inaccurate block list. Let them spend their time fixing their problem.

If you use an ISP with an inaccurate block list, don't be surprised if the only mail being blocked is legitimate mail. The spammers move on to other IP addresses, it's the legitimate business owners who don't have the time or inclination to do so for the few customers that don't get their mail.

then why don't they just get rid of all the TLDs on the net? After all, per IBM, having broad top level categories for things is less efficient than having one big honking search engine that is totally dependent on your ability to figure out something unique about what you are looking for. Instead, the Internet continues to be divided into an ever greater number of "folders".

All in all, this sounds to me like another one of those "Coke is really a diet food" type studies that chases a desired conclusion.