Yahoo Briefcase

Yahoo! Briefcase

Type of site	File storage and sharing
Owner	Yahoo!
URL	http://briefcase.yahoo.com
Commercial	Yes

The following contains additions the sources for which are in the process of being entered but can easally be found prior to then. Please don't just revert and vandalise as that makes it difficult to keep the sources up to date.... Users planning on downloading there files later today NEED TO KNOW ON AN EMERGENCY BASIS that they must instead join however many thousand, tens of thousands, or howevr many it getting the content back online if possible. Accordingly this page can tolerate being a work in progress for a few more hours. How can you side with yahoo when there own answer is still stating TUEDAY? (see link below to it in sources!)

Yahoo! Briefcase was a service by Yahoo!, an Internet portal, which offered 30MB of online storage of files up to 5MB. The Briefcase service started in August 1999. and is to be shut down on March 30 2009. The company has announced plans to delete data not retrieved before then and given notice this would occur after then. In fact they told users only after the 30th would it be unavailable, and even wrote us saying it would end on Tuesday , not Monday. At the time of this edit evidence in yahoo q&A exists of a very large percentage of users who planned on having the promised and/or reasonably understood time who are distraught and trying to get there files. Because of the size limitation these files are most precious. If they are not restored it will likely test the limitations of the click through waivers that allow this type of conduct to almost occur routinely. The supposed obsoletely quaintly inadequate limitation is about a quarter billion bits of data and in human terms that is a very large number of potential decisions users may have entrusted yahoo to preserve for 11 months or longer after in some cases paying a fee for real security in that expectation. I am hoping that someone will edit this page with a link to an organised effort to recover this human capital that is literally sitting in the way of a speeding magnet set to imminently obliterate it! Yahoo's customer service number has been posted and was working earlier at 1-866-562-7219. One user there reports being told to use the briefcase tech support form to restore her access, and did, only to get a message saying yahoo does not provide tech support. Even without users seeing the "Tuesday" (linked in citation above) notice, which is still online at this writing, human nature had them understanding end of the month, as had the author of the notice apparently when he wrote the last day of the week of the month apparenlty believing this March would have only 30 days. (such errors have made it into published case law before, which is an understatment I bet). Did the customer service agent just make up using the form to get the caller off the line, or is there something in the works along those lines? The last floppy disk commonly used stored only few megabytes. So although some camera's can fill that in a single click for many years accumulated writings across years could fit in the space provided. The real reason yahoo moved to shutdown the service has not yet been discovered. Previously there groups feature was a bandwidthhog, and they elimated archiving of the attachments, which probably had those same files instead moved to unique users briefcases. Among other questions is why they didn't shut it down in phases, with the originators of the files having longer access then others subsequently granted access of any kind. Does the file architecture make it too hard for big brother to monitor sharing? Surely something yet unknown is necessary to explain the haste if that is all that is responsible for the error. If not then some employee has been malicious to both yahoo and it's loyal members. These constructive but lengthy comments are included as this is an instant source of information and time is absolutely of the essence in it's dissemination. If you return to reread this and can't find it then check the editing history, where all prior version can be still accessed!

Usage of the service has declined in recent years and has been superseded by other companies' offers. However the ability to archive attachments in yahoo emails has only existed to the briefcase they provide. Those who did this are now faced with the fact that had they kept the email they would still have there file(s) after having found no equally easy way to transfer the files back to safety after the announcement. In fact yahoo acknowleded it would take users hours to transfer just a few hundred files if spread accross folders and accounts and gave signifigantly less time then users are told they have to check there email to act on the notice (less then 60 days versus 90 or more)Google has plans for a GDrive service, whilst Microsoft's Live Mesh is now in beta. Additionally, Microsoft offers free online storage (currently 25GB) through their SkyDrive service. Yahoo! Mail now has unlimited storage, as do paid accounts with the Yahoo!-owned photo- and video-sharing site Flickr. A spokesperson for Yahoo! said that "[d]iscontinuing the service will allow us to focus our efforts on more broadly used products".

Yahoo! has been losing market value since Microsoft's deal to buy the company fell through in May 2008 and the company has reduced staff. Yahoo! still dominates the market for display advertisements but this market is shrinking against targeted search advertisements, where Google dominates.

Sources

• Tameka Kee (February 2, 2009). "paidContent.org - A Bumpy Road Ahead For Yahoo Search?". The Washington Post.
• Michael Learmonth (February 2, 2009). "Google Closes in on Yahoo's Leadership in Display Advertising". Advertising Age.
• PC World (January 30, 2009). "Yahoo's Briefcase to Close March 30". Yahoo! Tech.
• Bloomberg News (January 30, 2009). "Shutting Briefcase". The Mercury News.