Most of this group's members - as well as others - have likely not
noticed that Yahoo has made a significant change to user ID profiles.
In fact, nothing but the ID name is currently showing, unless, like
me, a member has happened to notice and gone through the process of
editing hir profile. Neither I nor Paul had received any notification
of this change - which Yahoo notes in small letters is "Beta". The old
information I had was still resident in the Yahoo system, but as it is
currently configured it required me going through the process of
approving it for being shown to a viewer. It appears that Yahoo is
making this change in order to operate much like FaceBook, Linked-In
and similar connection networks.

Those who have been open about themselves (to varying degrees) in
their Yahoo ID - many of whom have also fully identified themselves to
us and are, thus, qualified to post to this group - will need to go
through the same profile update process in order to have anything but
a bag-over-the-head type image show with *only* their Yahoo user ID.

Unfortunately the new system does not contain the previous convenient
favorite links feature and the previous entries of those has been
relegated to a section "anything else". Maybe if enough people
complain about this lack of the ability to enter active links, Yahoo
will reinstitute it.

Another annoyance is with a new feature - sending a message to the
person whose Yahoo ID you are viewing. Sending one does not work with
our Linux computers, but I did successfully send a message to Paul
using our Windows based laptop for which he received email
notification on his Linux machine. I don't see a value to this feature
for me, but I thought it worthwhile to try it out and let others know
the problem I encountered.

Hopefully, more people will actually make use of the identifying
capabilities with this new version of Yahoo profiles. Out of
curiosity, I clicked on the "Connection Suggestions" link with my
profile and saw the system turn up 10 people. The first one on the
list is Paul and the remainder are all people with real names - people
I actually know, and most are in this group. There obviously is
something that is entered in the profile information that is common
between the 11 of us that the Yahoo system now recognizes. I
definitely know what it is with Paul ;>)

**Kitty