Bah!
Is there any way The Register writers could fall out of love with the once-droll but now older-than-Methuslah gimmick of putting an exclamation mark after every word in a Yahoo-related article subtitle?
As for Yahoo, I've been a fan of their Groups feature since they were called Clubs. I reckon they are simply the best all-round front-end for an interest group available for free. Mail agregator, image storage, file storage, simple database, calendar, polls (possibly the best way of starting an argument on the web is to make a poll and youcan't do that any easier than in a yahoo group). What's not to like?
Of course, they suffer from the same maladies that any WWW meeting place does, but there are some easy-to-use features built-in to the web interface to combat some of the most egregious ones.
It's certainly true that like many other companies they've seen their core business eroded by other, more focussed efforts, and have lost some of their own focus in the all-too common stampede to find a way of mitigating the damage by branching out. 360 had no chance against the slew of already entrenched blog products available. I'm surprised it lasted this long to be honest. Let's hope FLICKR has more legs.
Now if only they had someone intelligent designing their group front-page template so that logo image sizes could be nice and small if you want, life would be good. Having a tech team that had a clue and/or actually tried using their product before venturing to suggest "answers" to questions (Real Example: "how do I arrange for a small group logo image not to auto expand to a bedsheet?" Real Clueless Response: "Upload smaller images") life would be even better.
Perhaps a tighter focus on what the company is trying to achieve, what they want to be in the 21st century and so on, is required.