Giving and receiving recommendations for cool tools and useful online features is the daily stuff of netizenship. I still can't get over Mr. Wakeup . We've all given and received our share of cool tips.

A lot of the time, though, we overthink this stuff. We'd sooner go chasing all over creation for an inferior tool than just use the one that's right under our noses. Call it the foraging instinct. The opposite instinct - call it the nesting instinct - is what the major portal companies, AOL, Yahoo, and MSN, are counting on. As in "it's kind of cosy in here, I don't think I'll leave the nest."

And then there are those people who simply insist on doing things the hard way. Don't even get me started on the people who still use telnet to pick up their email remotely. Or worse yet, the ones who try to explain to me why I have to use telnet. Arrgh. Sometimes, such well-meaning friends will recommend cool stuff that is redundant or a waste of time.

There are a lot of great startup tech companies working on cool gadgets, and sometimes these gadgets spread like wildfire through word-of-mouth recommendations. Where would we be without these innovators? Yet from a user perspective, they may not always deserve your attention. Tool-makers are often depending on the fact that we enjoy discovering neat stuff, and that we don't know about the Yahoo! version of the same thing.

As the world's leading portal (not counting AOL), Yahoo! offers a full-service web experience. Yet it's surprising how easy it is to ignore or forget key Yahoo! features.

So... when to Yahoo!, and when not to? Here's an utterly opinionated guide to help you decide when to stay put, and when to go a-roamin' in search of better functionality or more fun.

The rating system here is simple: either "Stay with Yahoo!" or "Worth a Detour."

1. Email.

If you're looking for web-based email, there are thousands of choices. Some offer some features that you won't find at Yahoo Mail, but the benefits of sticking with Yahoo! generally outweigh the advantages. The main thing is the ease of integration with other Yahoo features. But that aside, Yahoo! Mail is simply one of the best, because it's so easy to use.

Verdict: STAY WITH YAHOO

2. How's my portfolio doing?

Money. Can't live with it, can't serve it to dinner guests topped with a tangy vinaigrette. One thing's clear: it fascinates people.

What else can possibly explain how fourth-mover Raging Bull, now owned by Altavista, became one of the most heavily-traveled corners of the web? People want to keep track of their money, and they also love to talk about it. A cursory check of some rankings provided by an online bookmark service shows Raging Bull to be the fifth most-bookmarked site in the Money: Investing category, behind Schwab, E*Trade, CNBC, and Bloomberg. (This isn't to say that Yahoo! Finance isn't ahead of these, just that there is no great need for many users to bookmark Yahoo!.)

The Internet offers many features to the average person which were once the preserve of finance professionals. We now have the ability to keep tabs on a portfolio of stocks, receive alerts when they move, do research on company fundamentals, read recent SEC filings, print price and volume charts, discuss finance with fellow armchair experts, and even listen to live webcasts of company conference calls. To say nothing, of course, of buying and selling stocks online at a huge discount to what your full-service broker used to charge.

How's Yahoo! Finance doing in this regard? Very well - it always has. The portfolios have always been easy to set up and are well integrated into the My Yahoo! start page. Multiple portfolios are easily managed. Now, through the use of the Yahoo! Companion or Yahoo Messenger, the key data can be viewed quickly without keeping a browser window open. This smaller footprint is going to be handy for many users. And increasingly, the vitals are available in handheld devices and wireless phones.

But wait, now they've kicked it up a couple of notches. Recently-launched Yahoo! Financevision makes you feel like a pro trader with its multiple windows, but with a special flair and functionality that could only come from this Internet pioneer. One window houses your own portfolio, another is the "television," with live or archived reports from the lineup of talking heads. Unlike the gang on CNBC, this group tends to be heavy on "senior" analysts who look like they're about 23 years old. As they chatter authoritatively about the companies of the day, another window updates with vital data - like you often see on TV but also a little like a PowerPoint presentation. If you want, there is another window you can use to surf around for other news, or whatever you'd like. This is unbelievable! The major portals are now starting to emerge as the cutting-edge media companies we always thought they could be.

Everything about researching investments online has gotten easier than it used to be. SEC filings, once annoyingly difficult to get and generally only fully available to EDGAR subscribers, are now well integrated with Yahoo, linking off the standard stock quote along with news, message boards, charts, etc.

True finance junkies are going to want to look beyond Yahoo!, of course, to various message boards, news sources, and the like. One handy research site is called Daily Stocks - offering a one-stop research center (they call it Gigablast) for every possible bit of data relating to a publicly traded company. For chart junkies, you'll want to look at BigCharts. James Cramer fans will want to become full subscribers to TheStreet.com, rather than just reading their free content available through the newswires. But the upshot is, you don't have to do any of these things. You can get all of your vital finance research done at Yahoo!, and the experience often exceeds expectations. It's particularly impressive the way I can see the threaded message board commentary for my favorite stocks integrated with my start page layout on My Yahoo! along with my favorite news, stock quotes, and currency exchange rates. Nobody does this better.

A key limitation - easily solved - is that Yahoo! portfolios and quotes are not real time. Surely, that's only a matter of time, since real time quotes are available at Silicon Investor, Raging Bull, freerealtime.com, and so on. C'mon Yahoo!... let's get real time!

Verdict: STAY WITH YAHOO

3. Online bookmarks.

There's no question that Yahoo! Bookmarks are very cool. If you want access to your browser bookmarks (also called favorites), you can upload all or some of your collection from your local computer to your Yahoo! Bookmarks. Now, you have roaming access to your bookmarks. You can add new favorites and store them in folders as you wish.

There are probably a dozen serious competitors in the online bookmarks category, including the full-featured toolset which we recommend: Traffick Favorites. So is it worth bothering with any of them, given that Yahoo! has a bookmark feature?

In this case, yes. We've test-driven a few of these, and most are worth the effort to set up. Yahoo!'s offering is still quite stripped-down.

The leader in a crowded field is Backflip. There are a number of advantages to Backflip for saving online bookmarks. You can share your collection with others; Backflip "auto-files" a link for you quickly in a relevant category, saving you time; and it allows you to search the whole text of every page in your collection (or others' collections), allowing for a deeper search for relevant resources.

Backflip is building a lot of other cool features behind the scenes, but what they have already is compelling enough to make it worth a special trip. Ironically, though, the supremacy of Yahoo! as the ultimate Internet brand is proven every time someone describes something by calling it a "Yahoo!-style directory." This is exactly the description of how your Backflip online bookmark collection is laid out.

Verdict: WORTH A DETOUR

4. Chat.

In our quest for the ultimate corporate conferencing tool, we at Traffick have been loyal to the products offered by the major portals. The best part, of course, is that they're free.

For some time, we've been test-driving MSN Messenger, and found that it did have a couple of unique touches. The percussion noises were pleasant, if a bit eerie now that they're being broadcast in commercials. We also liked the fact that MSN Messenger indicated when the other party was in the middle of typing a reply; takes a bit of the guesswork out of the conversation.

We recently switched to Yahoo! Messenger again, and were mildly disappointed by the missing touches. But its great integration with other Yahoo features like Clubs, the Companion, etc., makes up for it. Now that full-duplex Voice Chat is available, there's even more incentive just to stick with Yahoo.

If you're already a Yahoo person, you'll already know how to chat quickly and easily with anyone in a Club or message board you stumble across, if you see that their little yellow face icon is lit up. Hardly worth the trouble to use some other chat client.

That isn't to say, of course, that the cult of ICQ won't keep going on strong. People are apt to tell us "ICQ is the bomb." In this category, it looks as if whatever you and your friends are most comfortable with is what you're going to use. Inertia rules.

Verdict: STAY WITH YAHOO

5. Online greeting cards.

This is one category which runs on pure human emotion - frivolity, passion, sympathy, naughtiness. For these reasons, the reasons for sending the funny, racy, or thoughtful cards will be reason enough to depart from the lineup offered by Yahoo! Greetings. Yahoo!'s offering is improving, and now adds voice capability, but this seems unlikely to dissuade many users from looking to kitschy Blue Mountain Arts, nasty voodoo greetings, professional photo e-cards from Corbis, or any of a dozen others, for their online greeting card needs. To give Yahoo credit, they cover most of what the others do... but these are greeting cards, and it doesn't pay to get too logical. Blue Mountain's 15 million daily page views have always defied logic!

Verdict: WORTH A DETOUR

In the next instalment of this series, we'll look at some more killer features and once again pose that age-old question: when should you say "adieu to Yahoo!"?