The Hæven of John

Hah, it is crazy clicking links in Yahoo! Profiles. Every Yahoo link leads somewhere else and then you follow another link from that other page and leads you to a new one. Since there is no way to go back to where you’ve been before, you’ll get lost easily. It is a maze.

It took me hours to figure out what works and what doesn’t with their supposedly “new” Yahoo! Profile service (which includes following their links from here to there and never back). So to save you from pulling your hair out or kicking your AVR or punching your monitor (or prevent you from realizing that Yahoo should probably have sold itself to Google so their engineers and web developers can fix this mess), I am sharing with you what little I found.

Follow up:

First of it all, interconnection between different Yahoo! services is good but not great. One setting that works in another will not work in another. One setting here conflicts there. It’s a PITA (if you don’t know what that means, search Google )

That’s why I said it is crazy. One word: fragmented. Two words: Integration failure. ’nuff said.

So here’s what I figured out:

• Your Yahoo! Profiles link relies on your Yahoo! Mail “main account” and “extra mail address”
• But the above only applies to usernames with or without underscores.
• If your main account is something like “im.handsome” and your “extra mail address” is “imhandsome", it will not work in Yahoo! Profiles (you’re better off creating another account so you can create another profile for that other variation of your username).
• But if it is “im_handsome” and “imhandsome” it will work just fine and lead you to the same profile account.

See the problem now? Next…

• There is no way to know your Yahoo! Profiles human-readable link.
• If you want to know it, start with your default/main username; then try your “extra mail address” username".
• But if you share the same username with someone else, the first one to create a Yahoo! account (not necessarily activating their Yahoo! Profiles) with that username owns it.
• How’s that possible? Yahoo! offers @yahoo.com; @ymail.com; and @rocketmail.com. Username in all three are independent of each other, just how it is with Microsoft’s @msn.com; @hotmail.com; and @live.com.
• So what’s your human-readable Yahoo! Profiles link if someone beat you in the race? I do not know. Seriously there is no way to find out as of this writing. I tried it, been patient enough to test this and that, but nadda, nothing.

How about the new Yahoo! “Alias"? I do not know as well. I tried entering any aliases there and their system keeps telling me it is not available. I’ll give it a try another day and see.

So going by Yahoo’s not-so-old TV commercial… get a life… Yahoo!

PS
To Yahoo! International, give Yahoo! Philippines an access and I’m sure they will fix it. Aseans (f. South-East Asians) are attentive to such details.