I’m not down on Yahoo! like a lot of other people because I use their services all the time. Mostly: Fantasy Sports (14/16 in my NFL pick ‘em league last week), Flickr, Upcoming, Yahoo News!, Delicious, Yahoo email (yes, just for signing up for other sites, but still that has some value to me) and Yahoo Sports. All of these sites are pretty well coded, have great content, and are important to me. I spend a lot of time in the Yahoo Network. Yet there seems to be no real way to link the whole shebang together in any useful way. I spent 20 minutes trying to upload the same user icon to the various services and could only get it to work half the time, and even then it seemed pointless because I can’t compare stuff. Their avatars are beyond lame and image uploading craps out 2 out of every 3 times. Yahoo! has great properties, why can’t they make them easier to use as a whole? Why can’t they leverage their huge geek/art base in Flickr, their massive sports base in Sports, their enormous News base in news, etc. into something greater then the sum of those parts?

Meanwhile, all sorts of supposedly smart people work there and they go and create useless garbage like Yahoo Pipes. Why don’t they get their top nerds together and make a Yahoo! profile that actually links together all their best and coolest properties? Probably because the place really is in disarray.

Geeks are surprised that Yahoo! has not "integrated" rid.iculou.us.ly named delicious.com into the general Yahoo! (the ! is not optional) borg. 

This is because companies like Yahoo! do not buy things like delicious in order to transfer their brand to an acquisition. Rather, you are supposed to give your good will and your favorite feature sets to the mothership. Delicious was on to something, that made it dangerous, and thus something worth snapping up.

What's even more funny then comments wondering why delicious hasn't been supported is TechCrunch wondering why Yahoo! dropped the "2.0" from Yahoo! MyWeb, saying it's due to "avoid confusion with the “web 2.0″ meme". What's not mentioned is that companies love confusion with popular, cool, or interesting memes and deplore overhyped ones which have essentially no meaning due to bubble-come-latelys.