I'm a longtime fan of Yahoo! and their "my yahoo" web portal. Usually they've made good advancements and I guess it makes me a bit old-fashioned that I still use it rather than jump ship to other technologies every time something new comes out.
Despite their good record in general, they still sometimes mess up when it comes to Ads. Since Ad revenue is one of their main (if not the main) source of their income, I guess it makes sense that they have ads wherever they can. And as long as that doesn't interfere with my actually reading content, that's all fine and good.
But here we have an example of ad placement ruining the content experience. When I open an RSS feed message to see the full text, a pop-up floating flash-ad obscures the text of the entry. And it has no "close" button. And if I try to mouse over it I'm assaulted by fly-out options - none of which include "close" or a handle to move the ad.
This is a terrible implementation and now that I've become accustomed to getting my RSS feeds as part of my portal experience, I'm inclined to go build my own content page elsewhere rather than deal with this. I'm going to write them a letter. In the past that has been a colossal waste of time. Finding someone helpful at Yahoo is generally far more difficult than what I expect writing my own portal page would be.
CORRECTION: It appears that the example I've shown here was a bug in the particular ad. Which just goes to show me that Yahoo! probably isn't out to kill me, and that those people in the van probably were just lost tourists, not Yahoo!-Ninja-Assassins. Good to know.
