That's one reason I'm not particularly thrilled with where Yahoo's gone over the last year or two. Nowadays, as they've said themselves, they feel that social networking is the "in" thing, and have totally revamped the site(s) in that direction. So now, like it or not, many formerly (supposedly) unrelated features like Messenger and mail, your profile and even your Groups memberships are all tied together.
The relatively new "connections" thing --
