Following up on some profiles confusion

Hi all,

Based on feedback on this blog, and much of what I’m hearing from other blogs, there is a bit of confusion regarding the new profiles experience.  Because of this I want to offer some important clarification about how it works.

There are a lot of people who think we are now automatically displaying your information to the world, which is totally and completely untrue.  This probably stems from the fact that what you see, when logged in to your profile, is completely different than what everyone else sees.

You can test this by copying the URL for your profile, logging out, and then pasting that URL back in.  Unless you have gone into your settings and changed them (to specifically lower your privacy settings), or “connected” with another user, your profile is pretty barren.  Once you have made a connection with another user, they will be able to view more detail on your profile, but since you don’t have to connect with others you can still keep your info private.

Some other users are concerned by the fact that they will no longer be able to maintain unique profile pages for each alias used on an account.[edited for clarification] It’s correct that aliases can’t have unique profile pages anymore, however many users think we are directing all of the aliases to your primary profile, which is false.  Users can choose to have their profile tied to those aliases, but it’s not the default.  We understand that this impacts people who have grown accustomed to maintaining multiple identities on the Yahoo! network with a single Yahoo! account.  We are not prohibiting users from maintaining multiple identities, but we are asking those that prefer to do so to open additional Yahoo! accounts.