When Beta is worse

The boys at Yahoo have done it again!

After I've spent two-and-a-half years building up a rather fine Yahoo Photos Page, the bastards have decided to impose another 'upgrade' on the site, which - for the moment, at least - has resulted in it becoming completely unusable.

And the one brief glimpse I was allowed of the 'new look' was dismal - an unnecessary new home menu page with nothing on it (rather than the full array of albums with 'cover photos' displayed, which we had with the old template); and then an ugly plain white 'My Albums' page with the cover photos displaying in a really shitty resolution and distorted.

That's all I got yesterday - none of the individual albums were accessible. Today, even the front page isn't downloading properly. Oiveh!

I've always thought FlickR looks a bit crap too...... but I may have to transfer my allegiances unless Yahoo pulls its finger out of its arse pronto.

I'm getting terminally pissed off with Yahoo Mail as well (perhaps that's in the throes of a pointless 'upgrade' too? That's usually why the functionality takes a nosedive for a month or two.....): the "none of the buttons in the 'read e-mail window' works" glitch I complained of a few weeks back has returned, and renders the service pretty well useless.

Now, if I were running an IT company, my approach to upgrading would be:

1) Don't change the look & feel of the interface more than you have to, or at all.

2) Add extra features, without changing or deleting existing features which users have become familiar with and attached to.

3) Concentrate on making things faster, rather than adding lots of fancy new features which most people are probably never going to use.

4) If you're going to change things a lot (particularly on a website), don't do it all at once; let people get used to your innovations in bite-size instalments.

5) Try to avoid interrupting or impairing your existing service for weeks or months at a time while the 'upgrade' is being implemented.

6) Above all (Yahoo, are you listening??), try not to make the appearance and functionality of your website or application palpably WORSE!!!