A Night Spent Watching Yahoo Grow Up
We are the Internet Generation. We sit side by side on our couch scrolling through webpages, our Mac books like little heating pads on our thighs, with the TV on for background noise and both of our phones just an elbow straightening from our fingertips. Both born in 1993, our lives seem to follow the evolution of the Internet. It was having its ‘awkward stage’ at about the same time as we were — bad hyperlink formatting, pimples, and all. I’d also like to believe that all three of us have finally lost our baby weight and are, at last, all grown up.
So pulling up Yahoo.com on Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is like my mom showing up in my kitchen to make me Spongebob Mac and Cheese and chicken nuggets for lunch. The Yahoo.com of 1996 is bare. If that webpage popped up on a normal window, I would think that there was something wrong with my internet connection. It’s a set of categorized hyperlinks, in that oh-so familiar Times New Roman royal blue. The user has to click through the categories to get to the topic that they desire, the way you have to leaf through a book. In fact, it feels more like a print encyclopedia than a website.
I click through the years, pausing to take notes and every so often nudge my roommate to laugh and gape at the fact at what feels both so familiar and now so foreign. In 1997, the search option appears at the top of Yahoo’s page. It is complimented by even more developed categories, such as classifieds, stocks, and sports, that have time requirements that make them feel less like the encyclopedia and more like the newspaper.
1998 brings a plethora of new ways to interact with the website. Yahoo games as well as weather and shopping appears. Most importantly though, Chat and e-mail is introduced, the two entities which will lead Yahoo through the coming years. Both 1999 and 2000 demonstrate a marketing push of those features, emphasizing them on the home page. Adding to e-mail in 2000, Yahoo adds the ability to have personal links on the website like a calendar or an address book. Yahoo is no longer just a website — it is your website.
In 2002, it is evident that the website is beginning to move away from its newspaper style of reporting to one that resembles one more like TV. The news is no longer formatted like daily news but, more like ‘breaking’ news. It also rivals television in new Yahoo Music Top 5 category of 2003.
The early 2000's seem to be the years of addable categories. Starting with Yahoo Shopping in 2000, every year brings a new feature. In 2001, Yahoo Travel arrives, followed by Yahoo Music in 2003. Then, 2004's Yahoo Autos and Tech Tuesday. What once would have been mere look-up categories are now usable features that are specialized and fragmented into pertinent topics.
Years 2007 through 2009 are lost because my browser, ironically, is not using “the most up to date version” of Mozilla 1.2. So, when I finally get it to work for 2010 quite a lot has changed. The interface of the website has altered. The categories that have remained the steady foundation of Yahoo.com have now moved to a side bar and are accompanied by charming icons. The entire thing is more aesthetically pleasing. There’s more color, more image. From there, it slowly begins look more like the familiar page that I open up to most days of the week. Links to social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, are inserted. Video begins to be used. There are search interfaces for smaller categories, like stocks. By the end, I am left with a visual heavy and textually minimalist webpage, complete with cleanly fonted logo.
And what does all of this amount to? Everyone knows the internet has changed. All technology does. Phones have gotten smaller, and smaller, and bigger. The pictures displayed on TV’s have only gotten more realistic. My microwave is far better at making popcorn than I can ever hope to be. What all of this does demonstrate is the way our user relationship with the Internet has evolved, more so even than the technology itself.
It began as the familiar. It was just a different way of reading an encyclopedia or the newspaper, or watching the news on TV. In fragmenting itself, Yahoo.com moved into the era of personalization. We wanted to see ourselves in it, our personal interests, our lives and schedules. Out of this personal involvement grew the want for connection, for not only the ability to use social media with the website but, also to be able to use them interchangeably. A video could connect us to YouTube. If we followed Yahoo on Twitter, a tweet would lead us right back to home base. Finally, this leads into, what I have no better term to use for but, ease. We all know pictures say more than words can. There’s less to think about, less to sift through. The webpage is a true aid to our lives, an easy and natural extension of our fingertip.
The want for personalization and ease as well as the addition of other sites and influences have all caused this evolution. And they will continue to do so as these, and all other webpages, continue evolving into the future.
