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Yahoo is one of those insidious things that grows on you. The more you use one facility, the sooner you find something else that’s even more helpful. A better title for this review might be “Why I Use What I Use on Yahoo” because I don’t begin to use everything on Yahoo, nor would I want to! To various degrees, I use the facilities listed below. Now, I do occasionally use Yahoo Greetings (email greeting cards) but I find most of the cards either lame or tasteless. Your mileage may vary.
All of these items are set up on the Yahoo Companion Toolbar that I consider the key to using Yahoo. Unfortunately the toolbar runs in Internet Explorer only, so it’s not available on Linux. Like most things on Yahoo, the toolbar is totally customizable. You pick what buttons appear and in what order. Read on to see why this is so cool. Another key to Yahoo is the custom My Yahoo home page that you can set up. Home pages display in two columns, one narrow and one wide. You can pick from a veritable cornucopia of options to get just the information you need. I have four “home pages” that divide up things to which I want quick access. The default page covers general items like news, phone search and weather reports; the news items I selected cover business and technology, but can include sports or news from many specific parts of the world, if that’s what you want. The second page covers entertainment with ski/snow reports, TV and movie theater listings, and sports scores for the Chicago Cubs and Blackhawks. The third page has company news for the companies in my investment portfolios. The last page I have labeled as “Web Surfing”, and it carries my set of “view anywhere” bookmarks and a short index to new stuff on Yahoo. The bookmarks are also available from the Yahoo toolbar, but having them on a home page, makes them available from any machine with a web browser. This can be handy when using a kiosk in an airport or someone else’s machine. This last point is important: because Yahoo is available anywhere, you can quickly use the facilities of your “My Yahoo” home page from anywhere. The convenience of having the information you want organized the way you want it can make you more productive, especially when you can get to it anywhere you happen to be. So now let’s talk about some specifics. The thing that first got me going on Yahoo was the free email. If you use your company email address for personal business, you’re a fool. Sooner or later this will get you in trouble. Your company probably archives all email traffic; do you want your personal business stored on the company servers? Probably not. The easy alternative is a Yahoo (or Hotmail, etc) email account. These web-based email providers give you an address that is independent of your ISP so you won’t lose it when you move from cable to DSL or vice-versa. Yahoo’s SPAM filtering is probably as good (or bad) as any other. I’m so deep into Yahoo email that I spend $20 per year for POP3 (post office protocol ver.3) access and forwarding. This lets me download the email messages that I want to keep on my PC. Yahoo gives you a generous six megabytes of online space (compared with two megabytes on Hotmail). I find this more than adequate since I can download the messages I want to keep. Address BookOne of the disadvantages of web-based email is that your address book is back on your PC at home. The Yahoo Address Book takes care of this problem by providing free software to synchronize your pc-based and online address books. The current software is called Intellisync for Yahoo and is licensed from Puma Software, Inc. This works surprisingly well but there are several caveats. ACT v6 is not supported but Outlook 2002 is, as is Outlook Express 4.72 (I’m not sure if that’s the current version). Yahoo email would be useless if I had to remember everyone’s email address. I have over eleven hundred people in my address book, so synchronizing the lists is the only way to make this manageable. CalendarThe calendar is more problematic in that items change so quickly that even with synchronization software, it’s very difficult to keep it up to date, unless, of course, you make Yahoo your primary calendar. There are several features that might make you want do this. First, and a useful feature in it’s own right, are the holiday lists. You can select all sorts of religious and secular holiday lists and insert these into your Yahoo calendar. If nothing else, you can avoid inviting your Jewish friends to the movies on Passover. Ever want to combine several calendars to see when people are busy or free? Yahoo allows you to share your calendar with specific friends or the world. You can even allow specific people to modify your calendar. Is it a web-based version of Notes or Exchange? Of course not, but then it costs a whole lot less – like zero! Groups – email listsYahoo Groups is a fabulous facility. In exchange for exposing your eyeballs to a little advertising, you can set up and administer email lists for a few or many thousands. Several of the organizations to which I belong use these lists to keep members up-to-date or to allow easy networking. They are easy to use and work with any email address. Lately I’ve set up several lists for the Connecticut Chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC). We’re using the lists to announce chapter activities and for communications within the various committees. The lists provide privacy for the members in that only the sender’s email address is shown when a message is posted to the list. List members cannot see the names or email addresses of other list members so privacy is protected and there is no way for a spammer to harvest the list for addresses. Configuration options make it easy for the list moderator to determine who can post messages and access the web interface to the group. There is a small space in each group to share pictures or files. One feature I really like is the ability to set up a survey or questionnaire. Once a survey is set up, list members can vote only once. Results are tallied automatically. Way cool! Several of the DACS special interest groups use Yahoo groups to send out meeting reminders and to share code and notes from the meetings. PhotosDo you have a new granddaughter? No? Want to see some pictures of mine? This is how most people use Yahoo Photos. Currently I have pictures from my last high school reunion, a wedding, the CycleFest run by Hat City Cyclists, and a trip to Martha’s Vineyard. You can limit or share your photo albums as you wish. By now, you’re probably starting to get the hang of all this. If you need more than 30 megabytes of space, you will need to spend a few bucks, but you would be amazed at how you can stretch the 30 megabytes you get for free. MapsYahoo Maps are not the best maps available on the Internet but they are accurate and easy to use. It’s easy to add a web page link to a Yahoo map so you can show people how to get somewhere and they can even print the map. Once you find an address, driving directions are also just a click away. FinanceIs Yahoo Finance the most comprehensive financial site on the Internet? Not quite. But it is independent of any bank or brokerage and has all the calculators and references I’ve ever wanted. About a year ago, Yahoo added a means to integrate with my brokerage accounts. This feature uses an additional password and runs only under SSL (secure sockets layers) to help keep your personal business private. ReferenceThis is really cool. Ever need a dictionary, or almanac, or thesaurus at the spur of the moment? Well now you can look up that word in The American Heritage® Dictionary (English or Spanish), or find an alternate word in Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, all without moving from your computer. The Reference facility also includes the Columbia Encyclopedia, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body (amaze your doctor with your knowledge of anatomy!), The Oxford Shakespeare, World Factbook, and a Conversion Calculator. These are all useful references available whenever and wherever you happen to be. Way cool! MessengerThis is Yahoo’s version of instant messaging but with more features. You all heard John Patrick say IM and online “presence” is the next big business tool. Maybe it is in a company like IBM, but the lack of cross service support between Yahoo, AOL, MSN, ICQ, etc., makes IM problematic in the “outside world”. Your kids have no trouble with this as they can agree with their friends on which to use. In reality I find little use for this, but every once in a while it is fun. I can’t compare or comment on the feature set of Yahoo versus the other IM services but it will transfer files and act as a voice phone (pictures optional) via Net2Phone. Beyond this Yahoo does a fabulous job of integrating all of their facilities and Messenger is no exception. Running Messenger on your desktop gives you a little control panel for your other Yahoo stuff. For instance, Messenger can monitor your Yahoo email inbox for new mail, let you look up an address in Address Book, and check all the weather locations you set up on your home page. And it wouldn’t be “instant” if it didn’t also monitor your sports, news, stocks, etc., using the same selections as your home page. You might justify running it even if you never use IM! Notepad and BriefcaseEver want to type in a few notes but can’t figure out where to save the note so you can find it later? Well Yahoo has a possible solution. Yahoo’s Notepad is far from an online word processor but you can type in snippets of text just like Windows Notepad and save the text online where it’s safe and easy to find. Notepad is an option on My Yahoo, so you set it up there. Briefcase is a place to keep files online. Yahoo gives you thirty megabytes to apportion between your Briefcase files and Photos. Briefcase is handy for situations where you want access to a few files while traveling. No one carries floppies anymore. Upload the files from home and then download them to your friend’s computer when you get there—wherever ‘there’ may be. Since Briefcase is really just a different user interface to the Photos area, you can share your briefcase files, just like with photos. This can be really handy for collaborating with a few people. Yahoo MobileThis is another area with a fairly high coolness factor although some of the options can seem rather silly. Mobile tried to be Yahoo for your cell phone and PDA. This yields a mixture of wireless and web-based services that feels a little odd at times. Like much of Yahoo, you can’t worry about why it’s this way, just accept it and use what you need. What I currently use is a “Alerts” facility. I send stock information to my cell phone using “email” to send short text messages. Every day at 4:30pm, if my cell phone is on, it beeps and I can squint at the small screen and say “Well, the DOW was up 12 today”, or whatever it did. Each of these closing alerts can carry the close for three stocks or indices. Of course there are more alerts than just stocks. You can get sports scores, breaking news, auction information (Yahoo auctions, not eBay), horoscopes, and the weather (in case you can’t look out the window). Yahoo Mobile also covers your PDA with a special download area for software and a new search facility for Wi-Fi hotspots. Just for kicks I did a search for hotspots within 10 miles of my home. Results: zero. Not surprising given that I live six mile north of the New Milford green. However open the search up to 20 miles and I found 14 locations including the New Fairfield Public Library. At 50 miles I get 216 locations. Many of the locations surprised me. Give it a try! TravelYahoo Travel is really Travelocity and works really well. Given the recent changes in the airline industry, you pay a small fee to buy a ticket from anyone other than the airline you are flying. Regardless of where you buy the ticket, you need a way to find the flight that you want and Travelocity is as good as any for finding planes, trains, car rentals, hotels, etc. Weather, News, TV and Movie ListingsI’m lumping these together because they all have a common feature: you pick what you want and it’s available anywhere. The TV listings are cool because they are localized to the area and your cable company. For example, Charter Communications has slightly different channels in Litchfield County versus Fairfield County so my selection on Yahoo is “Charter Communications Litchfield Cnty (Digital), Newtown, CT”. For movie listings you choose a city, Yahoo displays the theaters in the area and you pick which theaters to actually display. Phone SearchOne last item: I don’t use the phone book anymore. I can’t read the text without reading glasses anyway, but I can find numbers much faster in Yahoo. Type “plumber” into the Yahoo Yellow Pages and you get a list of plumbers in your area (it knows where you are because you tell it your location) listed in the order of distance. If you know the name of a business, type it in. Type in “Radio Shack” and you’ll be amazed how many stores are in the area. Finding individuals is much easier online than in a phone book because I never have the right book and often don’t know the correct town. A quick search will show you every “S. Dude” in Connecticut or any other state. Well, that’s about it for the stuff I use on Yahoo. Go to yahoo.com and you’ll see that I’ve missed few things. Some of the ones I don’t use are: personals, shopping, health, sports, casual living (whatever that is), and many more. Yaa-Hoooo-oooo! That’s about as close to a yodel as I can get on paper or otherwise. The online version of this article will include links to all of the locations mentioned. Some of the items I use only from My Yahoo home page so the selection and set up is done from My Yahoo. |
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