Steve Diver wrote: >So, you have to click twice to read one message. To get back >to the list of email messages, you also have to click twice. Each >time, you have to wait for the webmail page to load. > >Is that what ecological agriculture is coming to? > >Instead of enhancing and facilitating the flow of information, >we are constrained to corporate web hosts and their >advertisements? > Yahoo have adopted something I call the 'falling marble' principle. Esoterically it can be visualised as a vertical tube with channels going off it at different heights and angles, each of which has a flipover entrance door. The channels rejoin the tube further down.
Drop a marble down the tube; if there are no obstructions (that is, all the doors are closed), the marble falls straight through. In the yahoo case, the advertisements constitute obstructions (doors) which deflect marbles (their mailing list subscribers and visitors alike) away from the tube down channels lined with advert hoardings and then back to the tube. People who join yahoo mailing lists are automatically confronted with advertisements. Most put up with the inconvenience and annoyance - I run 4 yahoo! lists and am on several others - if only for keeping up to date with stuff they joined the lists for. In fact, there are a lot of people who join these mailing lists who are only exposed to the minor inconvenience of ads accompanying their emails into their inboxes because they never go near the website (usually they become confused by yahoo's registration process which has all the hallmarks of being designed by an infant chimpanzee, and give up). Subscribers can eliminate adverts from their incoming yahoo emails. I think it costs about $US10.00 a month but don't quote me. At least two of the mailing lists I'm on do this. So yahoo can't lose. First it gets income from the businesses which advertise on its sites, then from subscribers who pay the fee, then from commission from businesses when subscribers buy advertised products. It has ever been thus in recorded history - take a great idea and ruin it by turning it into a money-making proposition. Like Planet Earth, for example :( roger
