Yahoo's lost it.

I've been trying to get to my inbox for like half an hour by now.
Up pops all sort of messages about temporary this and that.
This is just one of them.
This isn't just today.
It's been going on for weeks.
What's happening with Yahoo?
Is someone trying to make Yahoo work like crap?
Chasing away customers, driving down further the value of the company?
Or has Yahoo simply lost it?
Lost people who keep the servers running properly?
Or lost the ability to plan and build for the traffic they surely must be anticipating.
Is Yahoo falling apart?
Despite the pain in the butt to get all friends and business colleagues etc. use a new email address I'm very tempted to skip my Yahoo accounts and go with my gmail.
I'll give it a week max.
I'm getting very tired of this.
By the way, even while in, mails don't always open. which means I'll have to go back and refresh and try again.
Is somebody else out there experiencing the same problems?
It's not my computer, I have the same problems no matter what terminal I use,
i have four different computers at home, sure, that the same modem, but yahoo works as lousily at work.
I've tested it at friends too. Same crap performance.
Yahoo might be loosing it. I'm sorry for that. Been a longtime fan.
However, if Microsoft gets their hands on Yahoo, I might dump them anyway. I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft right now.

Internet addiction

In my last post I wondered what sort of super powers one would need in order to keep up with the latest everything on the web and its technology.
I warned against employees who seem to spend their entire days "learning" about what's out there instead of doing the work they'd been tasked with.
Yahoo today has an article on web addiction.
A disease I'm sure is more common than one might think.
In a way it's a bit like not being able to close a book when it's getting really interesting.
Problem is that the www doesn't have a last page.

check out http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/87251

when do they work?

I started working on websites and web-banners earlier than most of my generation.

More than ten years ago.

I could barely use a computer.

Despite the fact that I had worked on the Apple account for years.

An art director and designer by training my tools were not Quark orIllustrator.

I worked the old fashioned way. 

The studio had made the transition, and I felt as comfortable working with artists using computers as I was working with artists using sharp knives.

Well, more comfortable actually, as it had become so magically easy to see versions of most everything.

Suddenly  you didn't need a CLEAR idea of what you wanted, you could get away with a VAGUE idea.

Which isn't neccesarily as bad as it may sound. Ideas can grow bigger that way.

It's just that your committment to the end-result can wait the further down the process.

Over time agencies changed and soon every art director, and for that matter creative director, was supposed to do his or her own art, directly on the computer.

So I learnt Quark (for print work), Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign came along, Dreamweaver, and even Flash.

And that was just the beginning.

With the worldwide web exploding there were millions of things to keep track of.

Suddenly the target was moving so quickly that it started to take up my entire life.

And even though I spent most every moment awake trying to keep up and learning more there seemed to be hordes of people knowing a millions time more and discovering every new thing before I'd discovered them on my own.

The Web.2.0, and all the social sites.

Cool sites. New tools.

New versions.

New.

Some people kept sending me like 20 mails a day with new stuff I just had to check out,

Stuff to do. The latest tech.

At the time I was managing a group of over 50 creative people in interactive, and traditional DM. At Ogilvy One. Not a bad shop mind you.

But.

I started to wonder how the heck some of the guys reporting to me could find time to do any work at all?

As they apparently managed to keep abreast of all things new and report to everyone about it.

Either they're alien, or they've decided it's better to know the latest than to try and invent it.

That it was better to be able to talk about all the latest stuff rather than doing any of it.

Don't hire someone who spends his day researching the web, writing blogs, and shooting off e-mails to the left and right all day long.

Not if you're not a tech magazine where this type of work might have a place.

I was always a keen reader of magazines. I enjoy the way the best of them are designed. The photography.  The illustrations. The writing.

The good thing about magazine design is that one doesn't have to bother with technical stuff.

Just concentrate on the quality of the design and imagery, and the stories.

Basically the same with film. You have an idea, you talk it over with people who are technical experts and it all happens.  There's even a director basically taking over your job and you just tag along and some credit for it. 

From my point of view, as an art director and creative director, the old media was about ideas and production values.

This all fell part online.

Ideas were reduced to some simplistic animations.

Sure, eventually Flash came along and with it some magically talented artists and now you can roll over a home-page and stuff stretches and bounces. But how much fun is that after a while?

It must connect with an idea. And fair enough it does. In some cases.

www.rga.com has done some fabulous stuff for www.nikeid.com.

Connecting wonderfully with the audience. It's useful. Therefor it enhances the value of the brand. Content worth taking part of and interacting with.

Wieden + Kennedy's site www.wk.com is totally cool looking.

But it is a bit of a mess nevertheless.

I visited the page to try and locate some interactive work. 

You need patience and time.

It's only fun once.

But at least it looks fabulous. Which I'm personally a sucker for.

I'm also certain that the great looks of many a magazine are what made and still make them attractive.

That, however, can't be said of the same magazine's websites.

Wired, for example, is a nicely put together paper magazine.

Their site is functional and fairly nice, but a far cry from the quality of the paper version, despite the same content. And a similar look and feel.

The same can be said for basically every magazine out there.

The other problem with sites vs. paper magazines is that we're still not where we should be with sites.

The whole idea with a screen is that we can play stuff that moves.

Now with broadband there's no excuse really.

Still, only a fraction of content is moving.

The perfect magazine site would be more like a TV channel.

But cooler.

With aplenty of 3 minutes, and 5 minutes, and longer "tv" programs.

A smorgasboard of video content, mixed with still versions for those so inclined.

The little advisory bits you find in magazines such as Esquire on stuff like the three best tie knots wouldn't be illustrated by an illustration or a photo, but rather be a little movie. etc.

The seasons ten best suits would be a parade of guys actually moving, showing of the clothes as they would look in real. 

This of course, could prove to be really costly. 

Which will require a totally new production model in order to keep the cost factor low enough to be affordable.

Well, now I'm getting carried away. I will get back to these things soon.

I just want to end with my notion that perhaps those who seem to now just about everything about what's out there do nothing, and those who do, concentrate on one or a few aspects and simply don't have time to keep up with it all. to be ahead of the curve to shouldn't try to keep up with it, you should be the curve.

I mean, how long can your http://del.ici.us/ get before you have to spend you entire life with it?