Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Mem Right Home.

I'm Brian McCullough.

The news that Yahoo was going to shut down Yahoo groups as I said was another gut punch

when you realize how much of the web's history is so ephemeral that also got me

thinking that Yahoo as a company or a brand or whatever might be about to go down the memory hole

And that got me thinking about Yahoo's legacy as perhaps the first great internet company and that got me talking to one of the

deans of tech journalism Harry McCracken. What is Yahoo's legacy? Why has it ended up the way it has?

And also, why do we feel nostalgic for the sort of web

that yahoo groups represents?

What has changed on the internet

from the glory days of Yahoo groups until today?

So Harry, as I just said, I kind of want to use this as an excuse to talk about Yahoo, its legacy, what might have been.

This is prompted by the news that Yahoo Groups is the latest thing that's going to be euthanized I guess to a degree.

In your piece talking about it you you mentioned that Yahoo was the first website you think you ever visited

I'm quite positive of that they have very vivid memories so I believe it was at the end of 1994 logging on and being shown Yahoo by a colleague who was on the web slightly before I was and I even remember the first

search I did on Yahoo and they got me hooked and I'm sure that almost everybody else

who used Yahoo in that particular time frame it had a similar experience.

Yeah, I mean I know for sure I did. I don't know if I've ever told this story on this show but

like the first website ever made when I got to college was campus movie reviews and I remember

submitting it to inclusion in Yahoo because it was a directory which we're going to

talk about in a second but in my memory I always thought that I literally

got an email back from either Jerry or Dave themselves.

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