Apps

#TBT: RIP, Yahoo. You had a good run

Published

July 28, 2016

Monch Lopez

News broke out on Monday that Verizon, one of the giants of the U.S. telecom industry, is acquiring Yahoo for a small fraction of what it was worth during the dot-com boom glory days. Reports said the agreement was worth five billion dollars in cash — which is a lot but still nowhere near Yahoo’s $125-billion valuation in 2000, when it had enough in the coffers to buy Google.

And although the deal has yet to be fully ironed out — it will be completed sometime in 2017 — the death knell has sounded, the fate of an internet pioneer has been decided, and it looks like its next chapter will involve mobile video.

Yahoo, as you and I know it, is no more, even if it retains its name.

(Time for a disclosure: I wrote tech stories for Yahoo Philippines. My partner worked as an editor for the company.)

This isn’t a eulogy for Yahoo; it has historically done well on the stock market. People far smarter than I am said its stock outperformed its contemporaries from a bygone era. Unfortunately, its accomplishments on Wall Street didn’t mean as much to the people in Silicon Valley and to the rest of the world.

We should’t shed a tear for the company, or its investors. We could instead take a nice, casual walk on memory lane.

My early exposure to the web started with Yahoo services: the Yahoo landing page was my Facebook News Feed; the email and chat clients were my Gmail and Messenger and Slack apps; Yahoo Music on the desktop messenger app was my Spotify; Yahoo Groups was my Reddit; and all my searches were done on the Yahoo homepage.

If I wanted to get things done online in the late ’90s, Yahoo was my first click. For the vast majority of the population, including myself, Yahoo wasn’t on the internet, it was the internet.

And I wasn’t alone; my brother, all my friends — we were on the same page. These were innocent times, before hackers and malware coders and trolls and cyberbullies and mean-spirited armchair critics.

I’d be lying to you if I said at that time I thought the status quo would never change, but it did irrevocably. My social circle stopped using Yahoo for anything except to tell the people around them to use Google or Friendster or Napster instead. Being the impressionable youth I was, I gave in and signed out.

Your story is probably different than mine. But the ending is nevertheless familiar: We signed out.

Over the next few months, pundits will argue why Yahoo’s empire crumbled; why Marissa Mayer, the ex-Google executive tasked to lead the company’s comeback efforts, couldn’t keep the roofs and pillars from collapsing; and what could have been done to stop the cracks from showing.

I share the sentiment that it didn’t pivot fast enough to take full advantage of the digital ad market, and that Yahoo couldn’t decide what it wanted to be, even as Google was attempting to usurp its dominance in search. Most damning of all is its failure to act on shifting consumer preferences, the shift from desktop to mobile computing and from websites to apps.

I still have two active Yahoo Mail accounts: There’s one I check less frequently than my Google inbox; the other, I couldn’t care less about — it’s probably full of spam, anyway. That’s about the extent of Yahoo’s influence on my life today, its role reduced to housing possibly malicious emails.

How times have changed.

[irp posts=”8688″ name=”16 biggest hits and misses of 2016″]

Apps

Netflix expands its cheaper ad-supported tier to Southeast Asia

This also includes more countries in Europe and South America.

Published

May 15, 2026

Luigi Leonardo

If you don’t care about seeing a deluge of ads on your platforms, you’re an incredibly rare breed these days. That same skill will come in handy for those nicely priced subscription tiers that comes with ads. Netflix, for one, has one of those tiers, and it’s now coming out in more countries.

As is prevalent in other platforms today, an ad-supported subscription tier lowers the price you have to pay every month. The catch, however, is that there will be an occasional sprinkling of ads here and there.

Netflix offers this service, which allows subscribers to get the service for cheap at the expense of their time. Currently, it is limited to only a few major markets in the world. However, the platform is expanding the tier’s reach to more countries in Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia.

Starting in 2027, Netflix’s ad-supported tier will expand to 15 countries: Austria, Belgium, Colombia, Denmark, Indonesia, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, and Thailand.

Netflix says that the ad-supported tier is a popular option for subscribers. Currently, the tier has around 250 million subscribers worldwide. Since some of the new countries have a more budget-conscious attitude when it comes to purchasing services, this number will likely go up after the expansion in 2027.

Apps

Google might limit free storage to only 5GB

The change will affect new users.

Published

May 15, 2026

Luigi Leonardo

Google One is a monthly subscription that gives you at least 200GB of cloud storage for your files and photos. For most people, a Google One subscription starts when Google inevitably tells them that their free storage space is running out and will soon stop backing up files. Starting today, new users might get that warning sooner rather than later as Google tests a lower limit to free storage.

Historically, Google offers users 15GB of free storage as a start. However, especially these days, 15GB can run out rapidly, prompting a Google One upgrade. Still, despite how “little” it is, Google’s free storage is generous compared to its contemporaries.

Now, Google is reportedly going to be more at par with the rest. As spotted on Reddit (via 9to5Google), new users will receive only 5GB of free storage. Based on Wayback Machine, the company changed its policy sometime between February to March.

Notably, 15GB is still available as an option, but users have to link their phone numbers to their accounts first.

According to Google, the policy change is meant to encourage users to upgrade their security. However, critics will point out that it just enables the company to collect more data about their users. Of note, the platform is already pushy about linking phone numbers before the change, but this adds another layer to entice people.

Also, Google confirms that the new policy is only a regional test for now. They have not announced when (or if) the change comes out for real.

Apps

Instagram takes on Snapchat yet again with new Instants feature

Posts disappear after they’re viewed once.

Published

May 14, 2026

Luigi Leonardo

The popularity of Snapchat’s competitors is as fleeting as their disappearing messages. However, despite how volatile the market is, Instagram wants to try again with a new feature (and app) called Instants.

Pardon me if you’ve heard this premise before. Instants is a feature that lets users share disappearing photos. However, unlike the 24 hours allotted for Stories, Instants will disappear right after a friend views them, but they can still react and reply to them.

The idea of Instants is to trim the excess fat from what Instagram is these days. Instagram’s Adam Mosseri admits as much when he said users want as easier way to shoot content.

As such, users won’t have access to Instagram’s editing tools. They also can’t upload pre-shot content from their camera roll. Like its contemporaries like BeReal, the new Instants feature is about living in the moment and sharing exactly what users see.

Despite disappearing after a single view, Instants will be automatically archived, so they can be reuploaded as normal Stories later on.

It isn’t the Wild West, though. Even if it pares down all the extra features, Instants will still use the safety features available to all of Instagram. Users, especially young ones, can mute and block others’ Instants. Likewise, parents will have control over when and how their young children interact with the feature.