Another Yahoo! Product to Bite the Dust

I don't remember this service all that well in its early days, I started using it years later, but I remember him, an Internet enthusiast, surfing the web just for fun, not because he had clicks to click and sites to visit, research and so on and so forth. Emphasis on the verb "to have". It looks to me like there's no fun anymore on the Internet, everything is a must and a thing to put behind.

Yahoo! Picks is to shut down after 12 years of hanging in there. About time, many might say, looking at the Web 1.0 site that is basically useless today, when we live, as Duncan Riley of TechCrunch.com says, "in an age of mass produced and often automated link swapping and recommendations, the service is by comparison archaic, and probably not seeing an awful lot of traffic. Many of the original pages are still up, complete with their mid 90s livery." Check them out while you still can and try to catch a glimpse of what the Internet used to be: potential.

Now, it's a rumbling machine that dredges through our time and demands attention even if we don't always want to give it. The email must be checked, it might be something important, the instant messenger has a couple of windows glowing in the start bar, you just have to see what it is and the news are a lot easier to sort through using the web rather than old-school papers that give everything to everyone.

Yahoo! Picks was a site that highlighted the best of the web in a weekly and after that, with the growing of the demand of the Internet, daily updated service. It was the site where you wanted to go to have your mind blown away by the inventivity of others or their thoroughness or by their sense of humor. Not any more, wave bye-bye and say goodbye to what probably was an important part of your lives at one time.