I used to think Yahoo! was the best thing to ever come along. I told everyone I knew to get on board. It was a grand and majestic ship, shining brightly as it sped across the rough seas of the Internet. Sadly, its glory days are over. It is slowly sinking into the sea it used to command. The time has come to abandon ship.

I joined Geocities, before Yahoo! even owned it, in 1999. What a fantastic time this was for the Internet and its colossal portals like Yahoo!! But more on that later. This is the story of Yahoo!'s demise. I first witnessed signs of trouble in 2003, shortly after I embraced the Yahoo!ID "ernestuncle".

In 2003 and 2004, I built my Yahoo!Messenger list by surfing profiles that were on the same interest lists as mine, and by using like keywords. What should have been an easy and fun process became difficult: I stumbled upon hundreds -- if not thousands -- of fake profiles filled with spam and misleading links. Being stubborn, I prevailed and was rewarded with many friends. In 2005, I began keeping track of fake profiles I surfed past. Soon, there were so many violators on my list, I discarded the list. Instead, I decided to restrict my list to only those profiles that were potentially harmful to children; that is, profiles not labeled as Adult that contained extremely explicit pictures and/or innocent-looking links that lead to pornography. In less than a week, I found 15. Following Yahoo!'s instructions, I filed an official and detailed complaint. Then, over the next several days, I sent in two more such complaints to Yahoo!, each containing details on a number of profiles. Each time, Yahoo! replied with the same prefabricated email containing expressions of gratitude, and proclaiming their harsh stance against these lawbreakers. Five months later, not one of the 48 profiles I reported had been removed. In all fairness, I have not checked back on any of the 48 since then. I don't see any point in it.

In late 2006, I gave up on all Internet socializing. I returned in February of 2008 to find less than one-third of those on my Yahoo!Messenger list still around. I could see why: an even higher percentage of the profiles were fake, and the alternative, Yahoo!360, is still Beta and acts like it. Profiles from China and other countries were inaccessible, and no-one could even add to or change photos in profiles. Instead this message appeared: "The Edit Picture feature is temporarily unavailable. Please check again later." How much later? I waited three weeks and gave up. As far as I know, some of you were waiting much, much longer. That is, until they disappeared completely. I signed on for the first time in eleven months (in January 2009) to find all profiles taken down and replaced with another Beta program. I suppose that is one way to deal with the problem....

To add insult to injury, Yahoo! removed my website last year. They claimed it was because I had not updated it in a year. So what? It was just how I wanted it! Why would they remove my perfectly clean site while doing nothing about blatant violators of the law? Let's face it. Yahoo!'s days are numbered. It is caught in a whirlpool, like the one in my toilet.

Yahoo!'s coming demise was painfully obvious in 2006, but I hesitated going to MySpace. Not only did they have bad press regarding some of the concerns I described above, their pages are gargantuan! Many of my friends live overseas where high-speed Internet connections are not the norm. Most of them also have older computers, like I did until 2008. My old computer could only handle Windows 98SE, and even with a blazing-fast cable Internet connection, and Flash disabled, it could not load most MySpace pages. Now I have a state-of-the-art computer, and still enjoy a high-speed cable connection. Even so, many of the pages on MySpace take a while to load.

Regardless, I finally made the move. Unlike Yahoo!, MySpace has addressed its issues, putting many safeguards in place for children. My challenge will be to keep my page small enough to be viewed by my overseas friends. Already, some have had difficulties, mostly because of the large Flash advertisements that support this free service.

Many of you have known me over the years as Ernest. This is my real name, but it is my middle name. A brief history of my experience with Yahoo! will explain this. I first joined Geocities in 1999 and built a small website that mostly featured my homeland, the Pacific Northwest, since very little about this lovely region existed on the Internet at that time. Of course, since I ran a website, I had to use my full name, not an alias. Soon after, Yahoo! bought Geocities, so I tied my Yahoo!Geocities website to Yahoo!Messenger and Yahoo!Profiles, still using my full name. Having always been friendly, and since I was naive of the dangers of the Internet, I had problems with stalkers. Yes, me. (This is your que to laugh. It is absurd, even though its true.) There was more than one, so I can use the plural: stalkers. I removed my last name, and eventually all of the stalkers -- all two of them -- found someone more interesting to pursue. But, years later, I found all my personal information still linked to my web address in an Internet directory. Yikes! Good thing stalkers don't use Internet directories, at least not the dumb ones.

In 2003, I moved my website and changed my Yahoo!ID to "ernestuncle". (More later about how I came to choose this alias.) Soon afterward, I attached a second ID to it, "a_ernestuncle", so I could be found toward the top of member searches, hopefully before the searcher got tired of viewing countless bogus profiles.

By now you may be wondering just what my first name is (...or not)! It is David. Yes, my name is David Ernest... no, I'm still not telling my last name, but I will tell you it has a "z" in it. If you can figure out who in Salem, Oregon I am with just that information, then you are an intelligent enough stalker that I may even like you!

It's time to say goodbye to Yahoo! Maybe Microsoft can save them, but I'm not sticking around to find out. I don't have any more feelings of loyalty to Yahoo! In fact, quite the opposite. Not only did they throw away my labor of love, there other services are also failing. For example, I recently planned my day around a television special highlighting the life of one of my heroes, featured on Yahoo!TV, only to find out the station had changed its schedule weeks prior to my reading about it. Even using Yahoo!Mail has become a burden! For five years, I have labeled all the spam I have received, and instead of decreasing, it is worse than ever. Now over 90% of my mail is spam. Their so-called SpamGuard (if it really exists) is highly ineffective. I wonder how long Yahoo! will allow this commentary to remain on this site.... No matter, I'm smart enough to back up my webpages these days. Thanks, Yahoo!!

I have moved my profile and IM (Instant Messaging) to MySpace, my email to Google's awesome gmail (where I hve yet to get one piece of spam), and my website to Webs. I'm waiting to buy a domain until after I rebuild my content.

Now, as a sort of footnote, I'll tell you why I chose "ernestuncle" as an ID. Of course, it uses my actual middle name, Ernest. It's also a sort of play of words, since Ernest means earnest, or serious. Ironically, when my nieces and nephew were small children -- in order to differentiate me from their other uncle David -- they dubbed me "the fun uncle David". At the time I chose this alias, they were becoming adults, so it was time to be a bit more earnest in my dealings with them. Last year I joined the third generation, becoming a great uncle! I am very proud of them all; I have no children of my own.... yet!!