[LINK] "Once Upon a Time, Yahoo Was the Most Important Internet Company"

[rfmcdonald]

Wired's Julia Greenberg maps the growth, and decline, of Yahoo. That this Internet company, particularly through Flickr, is one I regularly use just makes me nervous.

Silicon Valley is full of giants. But one seems to be slowly disappearing. Yahoo was once an Internet titan, a ruler of the web. Now its future appears to be in question.

Investors worry about what will happen to Yahoo once it spins off its stake in Chinese behemoth Alibaba—or if it can’t. Meanwhile, among consumers, Yahoo has an identity problem—what, exactly, does Yahoo do?

These questions have come to a head again over the past week or so as activist shareholders called for Yahoo to sell its Internet business. High profile chief executive Marissa Mayer’s future is being called into question. A wave of executives have left the company in recent months. And even something Yahoo does right—its popular fantasy sports site—is facing scrutiny from New York’s attorney general. It’s been a long slide for one of the web’s oldest businesses—so long that it can be easy to forget that Yahoo once ruled the Internet.

Yahoo was once a trailblazer: it was here before Facebook and Google. It was here before we texted, tweeted, or snapped. Its place in the history of the Internet is in some ways singular: It was for many the first way they experienced the web.

At WIRED, we’ve tracked the ups and downs of the web since its earliest days. In the process, we’ve traced the growth and decline of Yahoo itself—the rise and decline of an Internet original.