Comments on: Yahoo goes drag-and-drop for mapping

New Yahoo Maps beta is designed to ease finding local spots and creation of multiple-stop driving directions.
Images: Yahoo Maps--a new world

Awesome

Ever since the release of Google Maps, nothing on the web was as spectacular as the new Yahoo Maps. It is beautiful - traffic data, local info, drag-and drop, good-printing, and many more - Wow! Yahoo proves again that it is a force to reckon with. This map is way better than Google's, actually it is like Google Earth in your browser. Way to go Yahoo.

As a side-effect, this news will revive the presence of Flash, which was slowly getting sidelined due to the recent AJAX Mania.

[scootz]

Misdirected Focus

Personally, I feel Yahoo in taking steps in the wrong direction.
Granted, it's nice to have the new features they provide with their map services, but what about when it comes to user relations?

Yahoo has a bad habit of removing user accounts without any form of warning or ability to correct whatever the reason may be that they've chose to remove the account.
There again, when you try to get in touch with Yahoo to find out what happened, there's no contact address. Only this poorly managed support application program they seem to have installed on the site.
When you do choose to fill out the form, you have to run through specific help topics, which don't list every single help discussion.

Afterwards, you have to hope and pray you're at least somebody in the world that they would take the effort to contact.

When you lose your account with Yahoo, you also lose your complete contact list in the Messenger application Yahoo has created.

Again, the focus should be on the current relations between Yahoo and its users, and whether or not they truly care.

It's not that hard an effort to send an e-mail to a user and alert them of whatever they may be doing wrong. It's more of an effort to delete their entire accounts.
Instead, they leave you wondering what it was all about in the first place.

In my opinion, until they correct this problem, Yahoo still sucks in my books.

Besides, Google came out with fresh ideas before Yahoo. Otherwise, Yahoo wouldn't be makn' the efforts to match and increase.
What makes you think Google won't simply pull out bigger guns as before?

[andyengle]

Misdirected focus: I agree!

I agree that Yahoo! has issues. In my case, Yahoo trashed my Yahoo Mail Plus (*premium*) account, which put me totally out of commission for a week. I couldn't login through their web site, couldn't POP in, nothing. It's my main e-mail account, which I use for business and personal use. I called them several times, and their response was that they didn't know what was causing the problem! It was especially frstrating because people kept writing me e-mail, and a lot of those e-mails bounced.

In the end, the account was finally fixed, but Yahoo made no effort to make it right. They never gave me a break on the $20 I paid them for the "premium" service, nor did I ever feel like they had control of the problem.

As for wanting to compete with Google, it's in their best interest to want to compete with Google. And they *should* compete with Google -- more competitors in web tools mean better quality and lower costs for consumers. But while they're fighting Google, maybe they should also be taking care of their existing customer base. I sure don't feel like I was really taken care of that well with the whole e-mail fiasco.