On October 16, 2008, Yahoo! introduce new shiny look on there profile service with aim to make a big social network.  They introduce a new look for the user profile, and the ability to create “connections,” which are mutual friendships. That’s it for the front end. 

Over the next few months, they say, Yahoo properties will begin to integrate with the new profile. So if you answer a question at Yahoo Answers, for example, the activity will show up in your feed update. Eventually the front page of Yahoo Mail will show what your friends are up to as well. And one thing I really like - emails from your connections will be highlighted, so you can read them first.

Before this new look, Yahoo user can see / create their own profile on URL look like : profiles.yahoo.com/<UserName> . I have a Yahoo! email account with ID ‘bauani’ for a long time and my profile page was in http://profiles.yahoo.com/bauani/. It was a simple page with very informative options to express yourself in brief. But in their new addition it is not that much easy anyway. You have to give your ‘Full Name’ to create a profile!

The comments from users were unambiguous - they were pissed off.  Common complaints include the fact that the new profile must include your full name, which your connections (friends) can see, as well as the removal of a few features that I’ve never heard of (like Cool Links) that apparently some percentage of users really, really liked. But by far the biggest complaint was the fact that all of the information in the old profiles was wiped clean, and users were presented with a blank slate like the one above (which is mine). Some users also noted that there was no message on that blank profile letting users know what just happened to their data. You had to go to the blog posts to understand what happened.

Posted by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch