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Yahoo!

Yahoo!

Yahoo!

Yahoo! Trolling Phenomena

From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia, by MultiMedia

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History

New Yahoo! homepage currently in testing New Yahoo! homepage currently in testing

Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale

Security checkpoint at entrance to headquarters parking lot. Security checkpoint at entrance to headquarters parking lot.

Yahoo! started out as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" is a backronym for "yahoo!", but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth."[1] (For this reason the word "Yahoo!" should be pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable.) Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki"—both named after legendary sumo wrestlers. The "yet another" phrasing goes back at least to the Unix utility yacc, whose name is an acronym for "yet another compiler compiler".

Yahoo! had its initial public offering on April 12, 1996, raising $33.8 million dollars, by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.

As Yahoo!'s popularity has increased, so has the range of features it offers, making it a kind of one-stop shop for all the popular activities of the Internet. These now include: Yahoo! Mail, a Web-based e-mail service, an instant messaging client, a very popular mailing list service (Yahoo! Groups), online gaming and chat, various news and information portals, online shopping and auction facilities. Many of these are based at least in part on previously independent services, which Yahoo! has acquired - such as the popular GeoCities free Web-hosting service, Rocketmail, and various competing mailing list providers such as eGroups. Many of these take-overs were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing services, as Yahoo! often changed the relevant terms of service. An example of this would be their claiming intellectual property rights for the content on their servers, which the original companies had not done.

At the pinnacle of the Internet boom in the year 2000, the cable news station CNBC reported that Yahoo! Inc. and eBay were in discussions to initiate a 50/50 merger [2].

Yahoo! has partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers - such as BT in the UK, Rogers in Canada and SBC ,Verizon [3]and BellSouth in the US - to create content-rich broadband services to rival those offered by AOL. The company offers a branded credit card, Yahoo! Visa, through a partnership with First USA.

Beginning in late 2002, Yahoo! began to bolster its search services by acquiring relevant companies. In December 2002, Yahoo! acquired Inktomi, and in July 2003, it acquired Overture Services, Inc. and its subsidiaries AltaVista and AlltheWeb. On February 18, 2004, Yahoo! dropped Google-powered results and returned to using its own technology to provide search results.

As of 2005 Yahoo!'s news message boards have gained something of a cult following. Attached to every story is a discussion board, yet rarely are the posts pertinent to the story. Often, the posts are deliberately outrageous, attempting to provoke angry responses which, in turn, lead to more offensive posts and so on. No news story, however sacrosanct, is spared.

In June 2005 Yahoo! acquired blo.gs, a service based on RSS feed aggregation, primarily from weblogs (hence the name), which produces a simple list (and also an RSS feed thereof) of freshly updated Weblogs, ordered according to recentness of update. blo.gs was the first Internet company hosted on a domain hack Yahoo! acquired, del.icio.us being the second.

Criticism and controversy

The Yahoo! Holdings controversy

In April 2005, Shi Tao, a journalist working for a Chinese newspaper, was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the Changsha Intermediate People's Court of Hunan Province, China (First trial case no 29), for "providing state secrets to foreign entities". He had passed details of a censorship order to the Asia Democracy Forum and the website Democracy News. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) investigated the case, specifically the ease with which Mr Shi had been caught. He had sent the message through an anonymous Yahoo! account. But police had gone straight to his offices and picked him up. RSF later obtained a translation of the verdict which stated that Mr Shi's account information, telephone number and address were "furnished by Yahoo! Holdings".

Criticism of Yahoo! intensified when Reporters Without Borders claimed translated court documents proved the company aided Chinese authorities in the case of dissident Li Zhi. In December 2003 Li Zhi was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment for "inciting subversion".

In recent months Yahoo! has also followed the directive of United States government officials in turning over information which the United States deems as key for continuing its global war on terror. Yahoo! contends it must respect the laws of governments in jurisdictions where it is operating.

Mail certification

In February 2006, Yahoo! also announced their decision (along with AOL) to give users the option to "certify" outgoing mail. That is, by paying up to one cent for each outgoing mail, allowing the mail in question to avoid spam filters. This decision is opposed by people that claim it to be a "tax on speech", which would eventually restrict freedom of speech as companies implementing similar decision would be tempted to increase the amount of mail classified as spam in order to encourage users to pay, preventing non-profit organizations to freely communicate with their members, among other things. However a large number of non-profit organisations, such as the Red Cross have signed up to the program.

Yahoo! Mail user name bans

On February 20, 2006, it was revealed that Yahoo! Mail is banning the word "allah" in e-mail user names, both separate and as part of a user name such as linda.callahan. [4] Surprisingly, other religiously loaded words such as "jesus", "mohammad", and even "satan" are not banned. Neither are many other offensive words. [5] Since Yahoo! is giving the impression they are selectively banning this particular word for "God" frequently used by Arabs among muslims, christians, and jews, along with "osama" among few other banned words, they have been raising voices about generalizing Arabs to be terrorists [6]. Shortly after the news of the "allah" ban became widespread in media, it was lifted in February 23, 2006. Along with this action, Yahoo! also spoke up on this issue:

"We continuously evaluate abuse patterns in registration usernames to help prevent spam, fraud and other inappropriate behavior. A small number of people registered for IDs using specific terms with the sole purpose of promoting hate, and then used those IDs to post content that was harmful or threatening to others, thus violating Yahoo!'s Terms of Service.
'Allah' was one word being used for these purposes, with instances tied to defamatory language. We took steps to help protect our users by prohibiting use of the term in Yahoo! usernames. We recently re-evaluated the term 'Allah' and users can now register for IDs with this word because it is no longer a significant target for abuse. We regularly evaluate this type of activity and will continue to make adjustments to our registration process to help foster a positive customer experience."

Chatrooms and message boards

Due to fears of preying on underage children, the Yahoo! "user created" chatrooms were closed down in 2005. However, Yahoo!'s messsage boards were not, as they are notorious for open trolling, flaming, racism, and general rudeness. The message boards are self-moderated; the only official channel for involving Yahoo! personnel is through a complaint form which seems to have limited utility.

Important events

Please note that this list is merely partial.

  • January 1994: Jerry Yang and David Filo create "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" while studying at Stanford University.
  • April 1994: "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" is re-named "Yahoo!"
  • March 1995: Yahoo! is incorporated.
  • 1995: Ziff Davis Inc. launches the magazine Yahoo! Internet Life, initially as ZD Internet Life. The magazine was meant to accompany and complement the web site.
  • April 12, 1996: Yahoo! has Initial public offering, closing at $33.00, up 270% from the IPO price, after peaking at $43.00 for the day.
  • June 8, 1998: Yahoo! aquires Viaweb, co-founded by Paul Graham, which becomes Yahoo! Stores.
  • October 12, 1998: Yahoo! aquires direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. [7]
  • January 28, 1999: Yahoo! aquires Geocities.
  • April 1, 1999: Yahoo! aquires Broadcast.com.
  • January 3, 2000: Yahoo! stocks close at an all-time high of $475.00 (pre-split price) a share. The day before, it hit an intra-day high of $500.13 (pre-split price).
  • January 19, 2000: At the height of the Dot-com tech bubble, shares in Yahoo! Japan became the first stocks in Japanese history to trade at over ₯100,000,000, reaching a price of 101.4 million yen ($962,140 at that time). [8]
  • February 7, 2000: Yahoo.com was brought to a halt for a few hours as it was the victim of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). [9] [10]. On the next day, its shares rose about $16, or 4.5 percent as the failure was blamed on hackers rather than on an internal glitch, unlike a fault with eBay earlier that year.
  • June 28, 2000: Yahoo! aquires eGroups.
  • September 26, 2001 Yahoo! stocks close at an all-time low of $8.11. The day before, it hit an intra-day low of $8.02 (both figures are pre-split prices).
  • December 27, 2001: Yahoo! aquires HotJobs.
  • June 3, 2002: SBC and Yahoo! Launch National Co-Branded Dial Service -- Press Release
  • December 2002: Yahoo! Inc. starts acquisition of Inktomi Web search engine
  • July, 2003: BT Openworld announces an alliance with Yahoo! -- Press Release
  • July 2003, Acquires Overture Services, Inc.
  • January 19, 2004: Yahoo! Inc. announces the formation of Yahoo! Research Labs, a research organization focusing on the invention of new technologies and solutions for Yahoo!. Yahoo!'s Head and Principal Scientist, Dr. Gary William Flake, leads the new organization. Dr. Flake has since left the company and now works at Microsoft.
  • February 19, 2004: Yahoo! dropped Google-powered results, returning to its own algorithm and index after it had used Google's results for a long time.
  • March 2004: Yahoo! launches its own search engine technology.
  • March 1, 2004: Yahoo! announces (as cited in the New York Times article listed in the "References" section) that it will practice paid inclusion for its search service. However, it also announced it would continue to rely mainly on a free web crawl for most of its search engine content.
  • March 25, 2004: Yahoo! acquires the European shopping search engine Kelkoo.
  • July 9, 2004 Yahoo! acquires email provider Oddpost.com [11].
  • December 15, 2004: Yahoo! launches beta version of its video search engine.
  • February 9, 2005 Yahoo! Launch is changed to Yahoo! Music, which still provides free music.
  • February 15, 2005 Yahoo! establishes its European Headquarters in Dublin, Ireland with the creation of 400 new jobs. [12]
  • February 28, 2005 Yahoo! launches a developer network giving an API to most of its search verticals.
  • March 2, 2005 Yahoo! completes 10 years of corporate existence. Gives out free ice cream coupons at Baskin Robbins to its users to celebrate its "birthday."
  • March 20, 2005 Yahoo! acquires photo sharing service Flickr [13]
  • March 29, 2005 Yahoo! launch blogging and social networking service Yahoo! 360 [14]
  • April 7, 2005 Wikimedia Foundation announces Yahoo! support [15]
  • May 26, 2005 Yahoo! announces its new PhotoMail service
  • June 14, 2005 Yahoo! acquires VoIP provider DialPad Communications.
  • July 15, 2005 Yahoo! announces Yahoo! Research Lab - Berkeley (YRLB)
  • July 25, 2005 Yahoo! acquires widget engine Konfabulator
  • August 11, 2005 Yahoo! acquires 40% of Alibaba.com for $1 billion US, and Alibaba will take over operation of Yahoo! China. [16]
  • August 23, 2005: Verizon and Yahoo! Launch Integrated DSL Service -- Press Release
  • September 7, 2005. Yahoo! supplies information to People's Republic of China which then jails reporter Shi Tao, age 37, for 10 years. Yahoo! states that they were following Chinese law. [17]
  • October 4, 2005 Yahoo! purchases online social event calendar Upcoming.org. [18]
  • October 17, 2005 Yahoo! buys British company Whereonearth Ltd which provides location technology.
  • November 15, 2005 The sports section of My Yahoo! is hacked; titles such as "selfhood + conscience" and "aesthetic freedom" link to various pages at doublereflection.org .
  • December 1, 2005 - Tivo and Yahoo! form a partnership where several Yahoo! features can be viewed on television via the Series2 TiVO set top box. [19], [20]
  • December 8/ (US time) 9, (Australian time) 2005 Yahoo! 7 announced for January 2006. Official Site
  • December 9, 2005 Yahoo! acquires del.icio.us.
  • January 9, 2006 Yahoo! acquires webjay
  • February 12, 2006 Yahoo! Developer Network PHP Center launched.

Yahoo! Research Labs

Yahoo! has 3 research labs:

  • Yahoo! Research Berkeley, California in association with the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.
  • Burbank, California (moved from Pasadena, California in November 2005).
  • Sunnyvale, California.

Yahoo! Next

Yahoo! Next is essentially incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies in their beta testing phase. A chance for the Yahoo! community to interact and have a say, on how upcoming products are designed and fine tuned. Each prototype can be discussed in its own individual Yahoo! Next forum.

External links

Yahoo!-owned sites and services

This is a partial, alphabetized list. For a complete listing of the services see List of Yahoo! services.

Information about Yahoo!

Opposition to Yahoo!

Home | Yahoo! | Partnerships | Aquisitions | Other Services | People | RTML | LICRA v. Yahoo! | License

Yahoo!, made by MultiMedia | Free content and software

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

 
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