For years I have found Yahoo to be a “shit” company. This is mainly because my mother kept using Yahoo Messenger while this product proved to be very open to hackers. Frequently she asked me if I (as I am a computer science student) could write her a program to restart other people’s pc (in other words hacking) because this often happened to her. Obviously she wanted some revenge.

So I never used Yahoo, not their messenger nor their email. Strangely I do use del.icio.us and Flickr, two sites bought by Yahoo. On Flickr the presence of Yahoo is steadily growing, causing many problems recently when they forced all old-school users like me to switch to a Yahoo account. On del.icio.us though, they are not that present. On the front page they are not even named.

So what is happening here? When Google buys a product they often totally integrate that product in their own services. Is Yahoo aware of their own (bad) vibe with users, and are they becoming more of a consortium of other services besides their own brand? Maybe one day del.icio.us will also be rebranded to a Yahoo product. I must say that I like most of the newly bought Yahoo products, so on that fact they are creating a better vibe in my sense.

One my Twitter contacts who did go to FOWA pointed out Soocial to me. The product is not yet released but you can sign up to stay informed. From their site:

Soocial is software that lets you use your contacts anywhere you need them. It’s a system that synchronizes your contacts between your mobile, pda, home pc, work pc, and third party applications.

It really sounds cool and takes another step from having to keep any critical information on my computer. My recent harddisk crash proves that having your emails and data online is a very valuable thing. I actually never got to setting my contacts because every once in a while I lose that data and it is not worth setting up properly. With only 522 signed up people I think they might need a bit more promotion so go sign up now!