Frustration with Yahoo Small Business

Last year I registered 200+ domain names with Yahoo. It was cheap and efficient, and all is well... until last week.

I had changed my American Express card number and as a result, when the domain names are up for renewal this year, the system alerted me on outdated information. I tried to update my payment information, and to my surprise there is no way to update all the payment methods at once. Domains' payment information can be updated one at a time only, which is a fundamental UI flaw.

To make matters worse, when I clicked on the link to update my information, the site would consistently return a blank page that leads to no where, and I am unable to update anything. I tried refreshing the page but again nothing happens.

In my frustration, I tried contacting support on the phone, and had been on hold for two hours without any assistance, and the call will then be terminated by the system. There are no email support available, and all the meanwhile I am receiving account suspension notices and my domains are failing one by one, a truly frustrating experience.

Here's when the nightmare begin: when I signed up for the service, the domains were 9.95/year. I just received emails telling me that starting on 2008-07-01, the renewals will cost me 34.95/year. If I were unable to cancel my accounts by that date, I will be paying upwards of close to $10,000 for domain names.

Do you have any suggestions as to what I might do? Alternatively, do you know if there is an email where I can reach customer support?


©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe

Yahoo! Live

http://live.yahoo.com/

Kind of like Kyte, except with better UI – but it does not do video streaming captured on mobile phones which the Kyte platform allows.

In a gist: Yahoo Live allows anyone with a Yahoo ID to broadcast webcam video stream from multiple users at the same time. Y! Live was previously used at the Winter Music Conference which streamed live video stream from different events: http://live.yahoo.com/evt/wmc/

Y! Live is currently under an experimental release, and supports a highly customizable widget for your live feed. I will provide more details after I play around with this a little bit further.

Bonus: you can follow @ylive on Twitter to see if there’s anyone broadcasting live from the site: an interesting idea to get audience.

Updates
+ 2008-04-27: In the original blog post published on 2008-04-25, I have incorrectly stated that Yahoo! Live does not have native Facebook and MySpace support, and i was informed by the development team that there is in fact two Facebook apps and MySpace implementation developed. Details to be posted shortly.

©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe

MyBlogLog Problogger Contest = Win-Win Marketing Strategy

So if you want to win the ultimate Problogger toolset, check out our little contest over at MyBlogLog.

— Tweets from Duzins (aka Robyn Tippins)

In an attempt to lure more customers to use MyBlogLog, a blogging community and analytics service, the company announced the "Become a Problogger Contest" which will hand out one grand prize winner to the community with the most rapid-growth over the period between November 8 to 30.

The grand prize winner will receive:

• One Year Pro MyBlogLog Subscription
• $500 Yahoo! Search Marketing Credit
• A 1-year membership to SEOmoz Premium Membership
• 1 Complete Blog Redesign
• One Year Subscription To Yaro Stark's Blog Mastermind
• A Featured Community for the month of December at MyBlogLog
• An invitation to the invite-only blog gathering, SOBCon 2008, in Chicago

More Details about the contest.

I thought that it's a brilliant idea. The contest is user-centered, and no doubt any contestants will learn from the experience on how to market his/her own site. In turn, the company gains the community audience that it seeks.

When you have a win-win strategy for both the consumer and the company, you have a golden marketing plan. This, btw, is my key take-away reading from reading an article on the October 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review, where Jeff Bezos shares his thoughts on leadership through strategic change in a culture obsessed with today's consumer.

Harvard Business Review: he Institutional Yes: The HBR Interview with Jeff Bezos

Related SML Universe
+ SML Del.icio.us: Marketing
+ SML Del.icio.us: Strategy
+ SML Marketing
+ SML Strategy

SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Yahoo Pipes: Search Engine Masturbation / 2007 / SML

Thanks to Alex's generous recommendation, I would like to unveil to the world my first Yahoo! Pipes that is reusable by the general public for your daily vanity search activity:

Drum roll...

Yahoo Pipes: Search Engine Masturbation = Google Search + Live Search + Yahoo Search

SML Flickr: Yahoo Pipes: Search Engine Masturbation: Run Pipe / 2007.09.13 / SML

For those who are not familiar with Yahoo Pipes, here is the official description:

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs:

• combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it.
• geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
• power widgets/badges on your web site.
• grab the output of any Pipes as RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats.

The source of this pipe look like this:

SML Flickr: Yahoo Pipes: Search Engine Masturbation: Run Pipe / 2007.09.13 / SML

I have been using it to create a rather large collection of RSS feeds for myself—which by the way is what is feeding all those content at the bottom of this page&mdashbut this is the first one that I have created to service the public.

This pipe simultaneously search for any search string using Yahoo, Google and Live Search. When you run the pipe (e.g. Run Pipe by entering "See-ming Lee" in the text input box), you will get a result that looks like this:

SML Flickr: Yahoo Pipes: Search Engine Masturbation: Run Pipe: See-ming Lee / 2007.09.13 / SML

You can also subscribe to the RSS feed after you run the pipe. Translation: you don't need to Google yourself everyday. Just add the RSS onto your RSS reader and let the machine do all the SEM (SML: Search Engine Masturbation) for you.

Happy masturbating!

Related Blog Posts

• Domain names = my one-line poetry
• SML SEO = See-ming Lee + Search Engine Optimization

Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML (SML Google / SML Live / SML Yahoo) / Search Engine Masturbation. All rights reserved.

Del.icio.us 2.0 Preview Sign-up

If you're an avid user of the current del.icio.us site and would like to see the preview release of the new site, you can try and sign up at: http://del.icio.us/help/preview

— Flickr: (nz)dave: Surveying the Damage: Comment: 2007-09-07

Source: Flickr: nzdave: surveying the damage

SML Copyright Notice

Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee (SML Del.icio.us / SML Flickr / SML LinkedIn / SML Pro Blog). All rights reserved.

SML on SEO

In the world of SEO (Wikipedia: Search Engine Optimization), content is king. If you write good content and thus draw enough target audience, search engines will be your friends.

If you are mainly interested in the U.S. market, then Google is your friend, because that is where this search engine has the highest market penetration. If your target audience happens to be in Asia or Europe, then you are probably better of with Yahoo!, because it has long had an international brand presence and Google just started to expand into those markets recently.

Interestingly, most Americans find it surprising that Yahoo has more netizen population than Google overall (Source: Compete.com). Since Google has more American population than any other search engine, it is natural to assume so. However, if you survey your friends outside the U.S. to see which search engines they use most, and you may be surprised with your results. In my random sampling, I have found that almost all of my friends in the UK prefers MSN Live Search.

To find out just how well you rank among all the search engines, I recommend Jux2, a meta search engines which combines and compares the results of Google, Yahoo and MSN. You may be surprised of how many results are specific to a single database. If you are trying to appeal to an international audience, you will do best to optimize your search strategies for all three primary players.

If you are an individual, can you utilize these techniques to compete with global international companies? I think so. I Googled SML (initials for See-ming Lee, my name) today, and this blog is prominently featured on page one among approximately 7,450,000 results. I am competing with global players and acronyms here. It's definitely a very 'gratifying' activity. :)

Do you have to spend a lot of money? Does it take a long time to see your ROI (Wikipedia: Return on Investment)? I don't think so. I believe that I am gaining these benefits all by writing a few poems recently. And I published pretty much all of them within the last four months.

I fell into all these mostly out of my recent interest in network theory. Based on my research, I have a hunch that Google's algorithm has largely to do with network theory (Wikipedia: Network Theory / SML Bookmarks: Social Media / SML Bookmarks: Network). This is a hunch, not a proof. Theoretically speaking, I don't think that any proofs are definite. You can, on the other hand, validate your confidence level based on statistics and analytics reports.

Copyright 2007 SML SEO = See-ming Lee + SEO. All rights reserved.