It must be the summer, the hot wheather and the need to refresh oneself from the hold ingrained habits and compromises of normal daily life in cyberspace.

A wind of change is nice and nothing is better than using this month for some really long due Kudos and Whips. After having sung the glory and pity of HorizonLive, Hitbox, Extreme-DM, Microsoft Windows and SomaFM the time has now come for the Michael Jackson of online services: Yahoo!.

YahooGroups
Yahoogroups has recently announced by way of an email to all the owners of any Yahoogroup that all email attachments sent and archived so far on their servers WILL BE FOREVER DELETED.

I am in awe.

How can they think that people are going to take this lightly?

I, for one, have been storing emails with project assignments for over 5 years on YahooGroups. I was indeed prepared to have to pay one day to keep all my stuff there, but once again Yahoo commercial priorities have completely surprised my customer expectations.

I find this a slap in the face of all of those who have had to bear with Yahoogroups very invasive advertising policy and strategy. I think that YahooGroups users will want like me not to let this one go by without making a noise.

I for myself will move all of my online projects and references to other services and tools that allow me full independence and control of my content as well as freedom from the exaggerated and very, very intrusive advertising and interruption marketing approaches used by Yahoo and its online enterprises.

Yahoo for me is a useless company. I don't value their search and directory service, and am very unimpressed with their commercial and business strategy. Customer service is nil.

The only one service I will be still using for a short while is Yahoo Messenger which has well served me for a long while. But there is a growing number of new alternatives that is some cases offer as much or more, without having you to compromise your privacy and ethics in order to be able to instant message a friend or a colleague.

What do I care that we are one million or 25. I use instant messaging to keep in touch with those I know, not with those that I don't know. Having a million users is a bonus for Yahoo and others who use us as numbers to be sold to advertisers.

There must be a time when one wants to say: "Hey wait a minute!" "Do I need to fuel myself all of this craze, this madness that maddens my screen, my TV monitor, the billboards on the street, my telephone and SMS pad...?

No. I don't have to. No-one has to.

It is only up to us to use a service that gives me what I am paying for because it cares and not because in the meanwhile it can squeeze something else out of me, while I am distracted.

So not only I want to stop lamenting but I seriously want to do something about everything that IS JUST NOT RIGHT in the face of the world of communications and media I want to have around me.

One) I trash my TV.

Two) I trash (after I have found a backup) all of Yahoo junk services which pollute my work online without providing me with what I truly want and AM WILLING TO PAY FOR (Yahoogroups and Yahoo Messenger without the ads!!!!!!!!!! - Hey can anybody tell them we are millions!).

Yes, I guess I am going to let you know soon which is the best ethical instant messenger out there! Promised.

;-)

Yahoo RIP.