It might not be Yahoo alone, but most of us have long been accustomed to organizing information in a hierarchical manner, breaking the whole into pieces or parts by directory, so that we are comfortable calling the starting page “the top page.” 
It is time to think in the opposite. Why not call it “the bottom page,” from which we initiate queries and update our boundaries as we move up along the way.
Update:
reminded me of my favorite quote by Kevin Kelly, which Tom Peters often uses in his presentation slide (see p19):
“The wealth in not gained by perfecting the known, but rather imperfectly seizing the unknown“
[...] Kenji Mori says it well: It might not be Yahoo alone, but most of us have long been accustomed to organizing information in a hierarchical manner, breaking the whole into pieces or parts by directory, so that we are comfortable calling the starting page “the top page.” It is time to think in the opposite. Why not call it “the bottom page,” from which we initiate queries and update our boundaries as we move up along the way. [...]
I like it – goes against conventional design patterns. Do you have any reasoning behind this or is it just an idea? I think delicious does a good job of creating a flat information architecture as there are many different interfaces to the application.
Andy,
Thanks for your comment. I don’t think I have reasoning on this but rather just observed what others have said/inspired including Jeff Jarvis and Kevin Kelly and Joshusa Schachter of del.icio.us. I totally agree with you about del.icio.us being very flat architecture/user interface.
What gyao doesn’t get it…
Gyao.jp is one of Japan fastest growing free of charge video streaming service with registered membership of 9.6 million +. Despite its self-proclaimed success, it, too, has the typical “directory” type UI, akin to Yahoo’s. Might be …
the post-modern approach to using a post-modern medium.
i couldn’t agree more.