Dear Yahoo,

Thank you for taking away the only Yahoo service that I actually use every day besides Flickr. I’m sure you’ll get around to killing that, too. It means I no longer have to spend any time dealing with your horrible web services.

I use Delicious as an extension of my brain. As a journalist, as a blogger, as a person who lives on the web, Delicious is the best way to keep track of all the data I need from the Internet. Being able to easily share links with others in a service that keeps all such links organized and neat (not just the news feed style of Twitter and Facebook, where links disappear after a few weeks), and having links shared with me is so valuable. Being able to access all my bookmarks (and search through them) from anywhere is so valuable. Everything about Delicious is valuable. This cannot be said about any other Yahoo service (again, besides Flickr). Mail is a joke, Google News has a better layout, your mishmash homepage is a travesty, and most people ditched Yahoo Groups long ago for Google.

It galls me that Yahoo made a habit of buying up small web companies only to then let them languish and finally dissolve them, leaving the users scrambling for something else. My entire digital experience with Yahoo has been nothing but disappointment from end to end for years, but now you’ve earned my seething hatred. Because, once again, I need to scramble to find a new service to replace what already worked for me. I have to export all of my links, hoping that the tags and other metadta remain intact. It will take hours of work between research and migration. All thanks to you.

So thank you, Yahoo, for proving to me forcefully how completely irrelevant you are to the Internet. Though Carol Bartz claims that people outside of New York and Silicon Valley like Yahoo, I doubt that’s even as minutely true today as it was before this utter crap you pulled on your users. I look forward to the day when Bing eats you alive.

No love,
K T