Knock, Knock (Who's There?) Ya -

What do you get for the guy who has everything? Well, almost everything. Yahoo just turned twenty. How do I know this? I found it on the Yahoo page. The front page from whence a great portion of my daily news emanates. Well, to be totally transparent, the news itself does not emanate from Yahoo. They don't tend to generate news, they retrieve and then disperse it. It's like what mommy birds do for baby birds. They chew up all the news and then spit it back up for us all to read in our own sweet time.
Yahoo is also where my e-mail resides. I go poking around that mailbox at least a couple of times a day, so I'm grateful for every time that I stop in and it's working. There have been numerous times in the past year when that wasn't the case, probably because of some large-scale industrial espionage or hacking. It certainly wouldn't be because the engineering or program was somehow inferior. How else could you explain the fact that they continue to thrive after twenty years? One billion users stop by daily to see what Yahoo has to tell us.
I also work in a school district that once upon a time handed out these great big unwieldy e-mail addresses. Now I look at my Yahoo address and begin to covet one of them new-fangled g-mail accounts. Lots of folks have them. Technically, the blog you are currently reading comes from one of those, but it's really just a pipeline that the friendly folks at Google allow me to pass through on my way from Yahoo to Blogspot. Pretty neighborly, wouldn't you say?
I guess you can be when you own most of Al Gore's Internet. People look at the Yahoo after my name and sniff, "What, you couldn't get on AOL?" Yet, in spite of it all, I maintain a weird but satisfying loyalty to the folks at Yahoo. Good times, bad times, try back again later times. It's where I landed thirteen years ago, when the Earthlink got to be too much to bear and after eWorld wouldn't let me attach using a PC. I went to Yahoo because I heard that they were giving away free e-mail addresses. And I've been there ever since. Except for those times when I really need to find something fast, and I don't want to have to sift through all that busy-ness. I sometimes wish that Yahoo would come up with their robot car or designer eyewear, but that's not who I am. I'm a Yahoo guy, and mildly proud of it. Happy birthday - Yahoo!