Web companies are not known for aging gracefully. They tend to burn bright and hot and burn out like the shooting stars they are, or collapse in on themselves, losing vision and direction, dense holes that suck in money until in desperation, their pages cluttered with bad ideas and blinking banner ads they’re sold to some “dinosaur” to be rendered for soup stock.

Which is why it is refreshing and hopeful to see Yahoo, the proto-web company from whence all others sprung be doing so well. In fact Yahoo, after years of being largely irrelevant is the new cool kid.

  • Yahoo has the high profile bloggers, Google has the rep (perhaps unfair) for firing bloggers
  • Yahoo has the the shiny new webservices, which are RESTful, and unstingy
  • And the buzz is (perhaps drawing from Blogger’s experience) that Yahoo is the company to be bought by. Who wants to be bought and starved? (Meanwhile Tim Bray is asking, “If you can’t trust Google…”, a company which is built on trust.)

And let me tell, boy does it take me back to see the old yahoo homepage (this is post “Jerry and David’s guide to World Wide Web” days, but not by much)