MyYahoo 2.0 Goes Live for All; Developer Platform Coming Soon
After more than a year in private beta, the new Web 2.0 style MyYahoo is being rolled out today to all MyYahoo users, the company says. MyYahoo is the biggest player of all web start pages and any changes made there will effect millions of mainstream users.
The best is yet to come, though, as Yahoo! also said today that MyYahoo would open up to outside developer applications in the next few months. That's among the changes we've been waiting for since the company's big announcement in April about a shift towards whole scale personalization and data portability.
We reviewed most of the changes being made to MyYahoo when the private beta launched in March 2007. Then, one year ago last July, Josh Catone here at RWW called for the creation of a MyYahoo platform as one of the best hopes Yahoo! had for its future.
MyYahoo's market share in the startpage field is massive, Comscore estimated in January that the site sees nearly 50 million unique visitors each month. Google's iGoogle startpage is a distant second with just over 20 million. Facebook, however, is destroying both services - it's at an estimated 80 million active users worldwide and growing fast.
The Facebook platform hasn't shaped up as well as was hoped, however. While Facebook's platform faces growing problems with privacy, decreased developer interest and lower than expected user engagement - a MyYahoo platform would be hot. The placement of Facebook apps on the public facing profile pages instead of the user facing admin pages is a problem that MyYahoo wouldn't suffer from. Additionally, while Facebook users arguably use the service for communication more than for the other type of activities that so many Facebook apps facilitate - MyYahoo is already a full-service, multi-use portal for millions of people.
If the Facebook platform was a first run for the social networking app platform paradigm, and the LinkedIn platform is the most sought after place for developers seeking a professional userbase, then a MyYahoo! platform would be the sweet spot for mass audiences of mainstream users.
We hope that the general availability of the new MyYahoo will be one of the last key steps before the platform opens up. In response to our inquiry about the time frame for the platform, Yahoo! sent the following response:
"This strategy involves opening up Yahoo! in three phases throughout this year (2008) and next: the first is to open up internally, and you will see products like Yahoo! Search, My Yahoo!, and Yahoo! Mail open up and become more integrated, sharing content and data. The second phase is to open up the Yahoo! platform to third party developers, which will be happening throughout this year, starting already with SearchMonkey. The third phase will be to allow the Yahoo! experience to be accessed off the Yahoo! network and you can expect progress on that phase throughout this year and into 2009."
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I recently migrated from MyYahoo to feedly and there is no turning back. Although feedly is content only, it is much more fun and social. MyYahoo 2.0 is still the same boring UI and has very little social aspect to it. Yahoo should have bought Netvibes!
I'm not seeing it here in Canada yet......hopefully soon though because it looks rather nice!
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I'm a long time MyYahoo user. It has been my personalized and default start page for at least 8 years, maybe more (wow, thats a little scary). I happen to like MyYahoo Classic and have resisted the automatic attempts to switch me to the new version (though they keep trying). I'm no Luddite and yes, I know it is more powerful and has all kinds of Web 2.0 features, blah, blah, blah. I just don't like it and don't want to get used to it. I use Google for almost everything else, if Yahoo forces me to switch then I'll probably just start over with personalizing Google. I know it is expensive to support two platforms and I'm sure it is costing Yahoo a bundle in engineering and QA to try to run with two MyYahoo front ends but they need to realize that users who have become accustomed to something for 8-10 years are not all going to react positively to change and that could have a big impact on a company that does not need any more reasons for users to look elsewhere for services.
The new "mandatory" MyYahoo feels like AOL-Lite. This is not an improvement. Farewell Yahoo. I prefer Classic, and you just gave me plenty of reasons to switch. Like MJK above, I've been using MyYahoo for years. I'll be switching now. Yahoo is probably going to be MicroShafted anyway, so no big loss.
I too am very disappointed with MyYahoo's attitude. Their suggestion board is subtitled "We are listening" but I don't think they are listening (jugding from the many negative comments on that board, many others with think the same).
Just have a quick look at the board and you'll quickly find more negative respons than otherwise. And many people are thinking (if not already done so) of moving away from MyYahoo to use other front pages.
I myself have started setting up my iGoogle with the same contents I had for MyYahoo. If nothing happens then it will be goodbye MyYahoo for me too.