{"id":2498,"date":"2008-06-19T11:55:13","date_gmt":"2008-06-19T15:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=2498"},"modified":"2008-06-19T11:55:13","modified_gmt":"2008-06-19T15:55:13","slug":"yahoos-ymail-dont-really-get-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/06\/19\/yahoos-ymail-dont-really-get-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Yahoo’s Ymail: Don’t really get it"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was talking with someone at work about Yahoo’s much-heralded launch of two new email domains, Rocketmail (which is actually an old domain resurrected) and Ymail, and despite much back-and-forth about it, I still couldn’t really see the point<\/a>, and in fact still don’t. I mean, I’m familiar with the rationale given by Yahoo, which is that there are lots of people out there who haven’t signed up for email because they can’t<\/a> get their name, or their favourite nickname, or whatever. And maybe there’s some truth to that. But how many of those people could there possibly be? Is this really a market segment that is crying out for Yahoo’s help?<\/p>\n

A couple of other things that struck me: 1) Are people really going to switch that easily from cathy1034@yahoo.com or whatever (or cathy1034@hotmail.com) to a new Ymail or Rocketmail address? Every time I’ve switched from one email to another it’s been a gigantic pain in the ass, and I have vowed to never do it again — there are all those people you have to spam with your new mail. It’s a nightmare. That’s why I got a Gmail address in the first place, so that when I changed Internet providers I could just redirect my mail to that address. I personally know of several people who pay two ISPs, simply because they don’t want to give up their old email address.<\/p>\n

And those are the old folks. Point number 2) Anyone younger than about 30 doesn’t seem interested in having an email address period, let alone caring whether it’s hermanzweibel@rocketmail.com or whatever. My teenaged daughters and their friends never use email anyway — they text message (in which case all you need is a phone number) or they use Facebook messages as a way of communicating. I send them email and they never get it. Do they have email addresses? Yes, and they are a combination of their names, underscores, numbers and nicknames, and so on — and they couldn’t care less. Not exactly a huge market opportunity<\/a> there either, I wouldn’t say.<\/p>\n

In a lot of ways, Yahoo seems to be fighting a war that has already been won — which, given some of the other things<\/a> that have been going on at the company over the past couple of years, probably isn’t all that surprising. I was trying to think of an analogy for this latest campaign, and it’s a little like the company has decided to announce a new kind of typewriter where the keys don’t stick as much, or a better version of the pay phone, or a new video-tape recorder. In other words, WTF?<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was talking with someone at work about Yahoo’s much-heralded launch of two new email domains, Rocketmail (which is actually an old domain resurrected) and Ymail, and despite much back-and-forth about it, I still couldn’t really see the point, and in fact still don’t. I mean, I’m familiar with the rationale given by Yahoo, which … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Yahoo’s Ymail: Don’t really get it”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}