tag:,2009:/1/tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3574- 2009-11-23T19:52:53Z Comments for My Yahoo! Gets Web 2.0 Makeover Movable Type 4.23-en tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3574 2007-03-08T18:59:48Z 2007-12-16T23:11:10Z My Yahoo! Gets Web 2.0 Makeover Hot on the heels of My.Netscape's personalized homepage makeover, Yahoo has announced a new version of its own long-running personalized homepage, My Yahoo. It will at first be a private beta, with a limited number of users being offered a beta account at http://cm.my.yahoo.com/upgrade. Yahoo's plan is to gather feedback from those early users and... Richard MacManus http://www.readwriteweb.com Hot on the heels of My.Netscape's personalized homepage makeover, Yahoo has announced a new version of its own long-running personalized homepage, My Yahoo. It will at first be a private beta, with a limited number of users being offered a beta account at http://cm.my.yahoo.com/upgrade. Yahoo's plan is to gather feedback from those early users and then make the My Yahoo! beta more broadly available - with additional features - over the coming months.

Read/WriteWeb got a sneak peak at the beta and we have some screenshots, along with our initial impressions, below. There is also a screencast available (but for now it is high res and slow to load; I'll notify you when a better version is up).

My Yahoo! has been Yahoo's personalized offering to its consumers since 1996. In the preview, Yahoo told me that My Yahoo! is seen as their "narrowcast" option for users, while the yahoo.com frontpage is seen as the broadcast model. However I was also told that, over time, the two homepages will converge. Certainly, the first thing I noticed about the new beta My Yahoo was that it had some of the new features Yahoo introduced last year with its Ajax makeover of yahoo.com. And the look and feel is very similar between the two.

My Yahoo! is essentially a user's dashboard, or start page, for the web. So it shares a lot in common with Microsoft's Live.com, Google's Personalized Homepage, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Webwag, and many others. However up till now, My Yahoo has been a relatively static personalized homepage - mostly devoid of the widgets and gadgets that populate the likes of Netvibes and Live.com. Also the design was rather conservative, although to be fair probably much more usable than the other 'start pages'. Also, My Yahoo was an early adopter of RSS feeds (not full text though).

]]> All in all, Yahoo has managed to keep its many millions of mainstream users happy - but with the trade off of falling behind Microsoft and Google in terms of widgets and ajax interactivity. Indeed we've noted a few times before that My Yahoo has plenty of potential as a 'web 2.0' start page - and thankfully now we're starting to see that potential being fulfilled, which is good news for Yahoo's user base.

New Features

The beta My Yahoo has a fresh new design and some neat interactive features (using ajax of course!). It also aims to make personalization simpler. Some of the new beta features include tools for:

  • pre-built personalized page for each user, based on data Yahoo has already gleaned from their usage of Yahoo properties - the design of the page is closely aligned with yahoo.com;
  • Category pages for topics such as cooking, plus "content suggestions";
  • Users can further customize their page with drag-and-drop modules, and new four-column and small search box layouts;
  • Feed previews and a full post reader on the page;
  • Editable Personal Assistant with instant access to things like Yahoo! Mail, horoscopes, local traffic, etc;
  • Redesigned modules from Yahoo! and select partners, with games, music, commerce, sports updates, weather, finance portfolios, TV listings, etc;
  • Sharing feature, enabling users to send their My Yahoo! page or favorite modules to friends and family - note, this is very similar to Pageflakes' sharing feature, only Yahoo told me that their sharing service doesn't require sign-ups;
  • More "new interactive modules" to come

Also noteworthy is the "hover bubble" (an unofficial term for an ajax-based text bubble). My favorite new feature so far is the MyYahoo Reader, which offers full text (yay!). Both of these features aim to give the consumer more content in the page, without navigating away.

What's not there currently? Widgets, but Yahoo told me that over time Yahoo! Widgets (aka Konfabulator) will be integrated with My Yahoo.

Conclusion

As you can see from the screenshots below, the new beta My Yahoo is much easier on the eye than the current My Yahoo. It is very slick and easy to use too. My Yahoo currently gets 50 million monthly users worldwide (their figure) and so it is the biggest "personalized homepage" on the market. As such it is careful about rolling out new ajax and web 2.0 features – in order to avoid the Netscape.com or USAToday re-design backlash from users. Yahoo also says it received "a fundamental United States patent for the invention of personalized start pages" back in 1999, although who knows what that means.

The new My Yahoo is a great improvement already on the old one and we'll be tracking its progress over the coming months, as it is slowly released to the mass market.

Update: Ex-My Yahoo Boss, Now Pageflakes CEO, Responds to My Yahoo Beta


My Yahoo Reader


Customize colors, columns, etc


Similarities to yahoo.com


Add Content


Sharing

]]> tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3574-comment:29942 Comment from alex on 2007-03-08 alex http://www.yourminis.com I think we are at the tipping point of web 2.0 methodologies, practices and technology hitting the mainstream. Experience matters and we are starting to see the big players realize that and focus on delivering a better experience.

With personalized start pages I believe that Yahoo still has a far way to go, however this is a great move in the right direction. Once this is deployed they will need to educate their members on the function and value of personalized start pages and widgets as a whole. This is good for the entire space.

Functionally Yahoo should also start thinking about allowing their widgets to live anywhere, ie giving people the ability to embed their widgets anywhere.

In addition it will be interesting to see if they are looking at integration with their desktop widget platform, Yahoo Widgets. It would be very interesting to see their web widgets running on the desktop and vice versa Yahoo Widgets running in the browser.

At yourminis.com we currently offer the ability to build personalized start pages, make them private or public, and in addition offer the ability to take any of our widgets and embed them on your blog / myspace, etc.

In the near future we will also support running our widgets on the desktop with Adobe's Apollo platform. I think widget portability it critical.

The next year will be an interesting time for the widget space and I believe we will see a lot happing around the widgetization of content and personalization.

]]> 2007-03-08T19:53:56Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3574-comment:29943 Comment from Eric on 2007-03-08 Eric yourminis is really the best start page that I've tried (netvibes, pagefalkes, yahoo, webwag)
and I don't work for them, just an user...

]]> 2007-03-08T21:56:04Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3574-comment:29944 Comment from Stan Schroeder on 2007-03-08 Stan Schroeder http://franticindustries.com While I can't say that Yahoo! didn't do a good job on this one, they still offer no significant advantage over the competition, out of which I personally prefer Netvibes.

]]> 2007-03-08T23:46:00Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3574-comment:29945 Comment from Joost on 2007-03-08 Joost http://freetube.us.tc Wow, really nice interface loads fast.

]]> 2007-03-09T01:05:19Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3574-comment:29946 Comment from Andy C on 2007-03-09 Andy C http://nbrightside.com/blog/ Yahoo used to innovate. Yahoo used to be my one-stop shop. Not any more.

Now they are confined to playing catchup with French startups manned by 12 people. Sad and quite perplexing really.

Having just wasted 17 mins of my life sitting through that slow, jerky, broken, 4 minute sc - ree -n - c - as - t, I see nothing that is new or different (from NetVibes/Pageflakes) here.

If you want to sell me something and are expecting a big blogosphere buzz about it, at least put the media on a decent server with some bandwidth.

]]> 2007-03-09T09:46:29Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3574-comment:29947 Comment from hombrelobo on 2007-03-09 hombrelobo http://hombrelobo.com What a mess. I tried for 30 mins, and went back to the old version.

I use My Yahoo a lot, I keep stocks, notepad, exchange rates, RSS, bookmarks, and a lot more.

Well, notepad is not supported in the new version. The stocks look a mess. Bookmarks are no longer bookmarks, but a quicklist that works extremely bad and slow, exchange rates are a mess.

A disaster. I am preparing for the change ... moving somewhere else ...

]]> 2007-03-09T09:46:35Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3574-comment:29948 Comment from Biser on 2007-03-09 Biser http://ajaxus.net I just checked my Yahoo account and new My Yahoo! Beta.. well looks like a real early beta to me….

Actually I dont see anything that can make you say ‚ÄúOk, My Yahoo is better than the competition‚Ä?, they just try to keep up with the rest.

]]> 2007-03-09T10:13:12Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3574-comment:29949 Comment from Tom on 2007-03-09 Tom http://www.dbreakfast.com Although the new layout looks cool, I'm gravitating more toward the Google portal. I've been a user of Yahoo for many years and I really like the Yahoo Finance stuff but I spend most of my time on my Google page these days.

I guess we'll have to wait and see on this one.

]]> 2007-03-09T21:04:17Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3574-comment:29950 Comment from RC on 2007-03-09 RC My Yahoo succeeded by balancing reasonable functionality with decent performance and usability. Recently however they are totally messed up, with the Yahoo TV as just one disastrous example. They took what used to be a valuable and usable service, added Ajax and snazzy UI, and ended up with an un-usable, slower performing, less functional site. And in so doing they also broke the MyYahoo component of it so that half the shows no longer link-in.

This new My Yahoo sure looks like more of the same thing. Instead of making customer needs the priority, they are throwing widgets and Ajax at it and pretending they are improving their service. Don't they have any product management?

I use MyYahoo every day all the time - improvements would be nice, but not change for the sake of cool.

]]> 2007-03-09T23:23:44Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3574-comment:29951 Comment from Zach katkin on 2007-03-12 Zach katkin http://www.webdesignid.com/blog Looks really nice. Hopefully all of these web 2.0 updates and social media upgrades will help educate your average user on the power of social media.

]]> 2007-03-13T02:51:08Z