I have been thrown back into using Yahoo! services lately, since they took over Flickr, which is a favorite site of mine, and also Associated Content (now Yahoo! Contributor Network), which is a website I’ve written a few articles for over the years.

Yahoo! has just fired their CEO, who was supposed to revamp the whole company’s image but failed to do so during her 3-year tenure.

We all know Yahoo!’s issue … it’s just not “with it” (aka “cool”). I mean, they have a ! in their name. That is so 1990’s.

Personally, I associate Yahoo! with the times where we weren’t allowed to use internet sources and had to use books. Now that it’s okay to use the internet for research, I never think of Yahoo! as the place to turn, but go to Wikipedia and Google instead. Basically, Yahoo! hasn’t managed to keep up with the changing web, and despite switching CEOs a couple of times in the last 5 years, they haven’t captured the spirit of being new and fresh and up to date.

So if you were to take over Yahoo! what would you do to make it more appealing to the internet users of the 2010’s? How would you bring Yahoo! out of it’s funk as a throw back to the 1990’s?

Here are some of my ideas, but please post any of yours in the comments!

Social Media/Blogging

I remember being all about some Yahoo! Geocities as a kid. Man I loved having my own website. But there weren’t a ton of design tools provided with the free option. Today, such a limited supply of free tools would be ridiculous. Look at Wordpress’s free platform, and all the beautiful themes you can choose from.

Where is Yahoo!s answer to Wordpress and Blogger? Sure it’s already been done, but it had already been done when Google took over Blogger too, and it seems to be doing extremely well with Etsy artists and other folks who want a free, easy to manage blog.

I’d say there’s room for Yahoo! to get people on a blogging network, and offer some sort of different features. Maybe some kind of good categorization system, so people who are all blogging about a particular topic are all easy to find and rank? Ideas for a new free blogging platform alone could be a whole ‘nother post (or even series.)

Acquisitions of existing cool sites

Yahoo!s acquisition of Flickr and AssociatedContent got me logging back into things with my Yahoo! user name now, which makes me that much more amenable to exploring other Yahoo! services, since I’m already logged in. However, Flickr was around and established for a long time before Yahoo! stepped in to take over. How about acquiring some sites that aren’t quite established yet, are “up and coming”? (Like my up and coming neighborhood?)

Of course, Yahoo!s negative coolness could backfire on developing sites and cause them to lose any cool reputation they were building … But I’m sure there’s a way they could make it work.

Provide features that are useful to businesses or schools

When people are obligated to get a Yahoo! account for work or school, they may be more likely to use other Yahoo! services. (But if the features they’re using in the first place are frustrating, they will just hate it.) We used Google Docs quite a bit in college when working on group projects, which forced the few holdouts in the class to get a Google account and start discovering the wonder of Google. There is plenty of room for improvement in shared work sites like this too, so Yahoo! could capitalize on that.

They could provide an easy way to set up a password protected web page if a teacher wants to use it for a class project and have only students in the school able to access it. There are tons of possibilities.

Start something new

Google isn’t the only one who can hire creative engineers. Yahoo! needs a way to encourage their engineers to spend time thinking of new ideas and have a good system set up for those ideas to be communicated, evaluated, and rewarded.

This article I read explained that Yahoo! falls short on maintaining reader attention. Plenty of people access the site, but they don’t stick around and spend much time on it. If you had Yahoo!s formidable resources to draw on, how would you convince users to stay on the site longer?