Between the chats, instant messenger, search before Google, multiplayer games online with strangers (albeit simple ones like chess and poker), and Geocities it was my first taste of the types of things I do online to this day. I think it's okay to mourn a bit for how we remember the company.
I remember receiving a two-disk copy of Netscape Navigator from a local ISP at a computer show in early 1995 and setting the home-page immediately to Yahoo. At the time I remember seeing hard copies of "The Internet Yellow Pages" at the local Barnes and Noble, but most search was through Yahoo or Alta Vista. Back then AV had several fewer orders of magnitude web pages to crawl and SEO/spam hadn't yet taken off, but even still the AV results weren't always useful. Without page rank or a decent sorting algorithm, I remember often going through pages of results.
Yahoo had it all: games, continuously updated stock quotes (at a time when I would look up share prices in the morning's paper, priced to the nearest eighth of a dollar), weather, news, and hand picked results from around the web. It was all I was previously getting from CompuServe/Prodigy, but at no cost.
But now I haven't visited Yahoo in years. It's like when your favorite teenage band breaks up. You're a little sad, but you've moved on. The fond memories are for life.
Edited to add: we all used a home page back then because tabs hadn't yet been invented, meaning the restore previously opened tabs option that we all use today also didn't exist. One's home page had a much greater importance back then.
I won a Final Four bracket against high school classmates on the site's fantasy sports page and knowing nothing about college basketball. I made $150 from that.
Even though they clearly made strategic mistakes and Mayer's revival may have been too little too late it's still sad when an "old-school" tech firm goes under, especially one that touched so many lives.
This is my Nokia heartbreak all over again
cough
Dude, give up the skinny jeans :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X
"Generation X, commonly abbreviated to Gen X, is the generation born after the Western Post–World War II baby boom. Demographers and commentators use birth dates ranging from the early 1960s to the early 1980s."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials
"Millennials are the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates when the generation starts and end; most researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s."
Someone 35 is on the bubble.
But never will I give up the skinny jeans!
With that said, it's been my observation that people born within a few years of the line in each direction -- as far as '77 to '88 -- tend to share the same values and have characteristics of both Millenials and Xers (born in '84 here, and I'll gladly apply that description to myself). I've also seen people, particularly those in the S&H community, use the term "Generation Y" specifically to refer to this cusp and not to Millennials as a whole.
Gen-X stereotypes tend to be more true for people born '76 and earlier, and Millennial stereotypes tend to be more true for people born '89 and later.
"Millennials (also known as the Millennial Generation[1] or Generation Y) are the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates when the generation starts and ends; most researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s."
1979/80 would both put you in Gen X as a birth year ('61-'81, although Harvard for some reason thinks '64-'84 - either way, bad luck, Coupland novel it is).
I gave up Yahoo mail years ago.
The only thing I ever went to glance at was finance.yahoo.com -- because it seemed to be the literally only page that you could gleen info from yahoo in a split second...
I miss discovering new search engines (Lycos, Lycos FTP Search, Dogpile, this new one with a stupid named called Google). I didn't use Yahoo! heavily at that time but I did use Geocities pages alot (before they were bought).
Where are the rainbow horizontal rulers now, eh? And marquee tags? They should make a comeback.