News

Mobile users: access the cloud via Briefcase? Not any more!

"This is the email that Yahoo! has sent its Yahoo! Briefcase users in order to tell them that all the files they had kept online are going to be toast at the end of the month," wrote blogger Suw Charman-Anderson yesterday.

Her blog shows "An empty email with two identical 'noname' attachments - I very nearly deleted it as spam."

It's not a spoof. Yahoo! really is closing down Briefcase, and it really is doing it with one month's notice, and it really is doing its level best to make sure users only hear about it by chance.

Well done Yahoo!, I think you’ve just earned the first Strange Attractor FoTY (F*ckwit of the Year) 2009 Award. And it’s only February,

writes Suw. We'll pause, briefly, to wonder how, at the start of the Cloud Computing age, Yahoo! can't sell a free cloud-based data storage service - and we'll probably decide it's another FotY contender.

Well, now they've been exposed as f*ckwits, we can be sure Yahoo! won't make the same mistake again. Well, you'd think... but no. This is not the first time. Cut to July 2007 and Suw's blog can be found reporting that Yahoo! Photos will close, and all user pictures deleted if they aren't downloaded: 

You can download your photos, but you can only download them one at a time. There’s no bulk download, so if you have a lot of photos you’re in for a tedious ride. Again, Yahoo!’s underlying assumption seems to be that people aren’t interested in keeping all their photos: “for many of you it won’t take much time to download your favorites”, as if your favourites are the only photos that matter.

Again, the shortest possible notice period.

There's an interesting sub-text here. I mean, until they actually admitted that almost nobody used Photos, Yahoo! had publicised it as an important feature. And now that it's admitted that Briefcase is empty, we realise that all the excited publicity about how useful it would be was nonsense, too.

So, which other exciting, Web 2.0ish Yahoo! services are going to quietly evaporate overnight with a sulky email in the next six months?