Third-Party Services, More Customization

Today's announcement is mostly geared towards developers, but judging from an earlier post on Yahoo's official blog in September, it is clear that Yahoo will provide its users with the ability to customize the home page to a far greater degree than is currently possible - perhaps in line with the 2007 goal to bring it closer to the functionality of My Yahoo!.

Yahoo's overall goal for the yahoo.com redesign is to give mainstream users a one-stop home page that allows for checking multiple email accounts and accessing personalized applications, while still keeping the look and feel of the old, familiar front page.

The new front page is clearly part of Yahoo's overall goal of opening up its services. At the same time, it also looks somewhat similar to AOL's latest redesign of its its portal. AOL's new front page also features a customizable sidebar and lets users access third-party services like Twitter, Gmail, and Facebook.

What About My.Yahoo.com?

Of course, with My Yahoo, Yahoo already has a highly customizable portal solution. It is not clear if the front page redesign will also be extended to My Yahoo, but the screenshots of the new home page we have seen so far do not feature a link to My Yahoo anymore. This leads us to believe that Yahoo might be slowly abandoning that service in favor of the redesigned front page.

Update: RWW editor Richard MacManus added some further detail to the post, based on our 2006-07 coverage.

YourMinis was a start-page service like no other, but its feature richness and happy users fall victim to the cold business logic that so many cool startups face after being acquired. YourMinis is now primarily used to power advertising widgets for AOL, a practice that will continue but pales in comparison to the beautiful topical pages its users built with the full service over the last several years.

As several upset users pointed out in the blog post announcing the service's closure, though, none of these services are quite like YourMinis. The Flash interface, while disliked by some critics as all things Flash are, allowed fans greater flexibility in visual design.

Few if any of the many start-page startups have succeeded in their vision of becoming mini-publishing houses for users building content aggregation pages that are then shared with the world. See our interview last year with Dan Cohen, who has lead the team at Pageflakes, iGoogle and MyYahoo, for a great look into the start-page world.

All too often, this is how it goes in startup land. You fall in love with an innovative little service, you give it your attention, then it gets scooped up by a big player and everyone is happy until the acquiring company turns it into an ad network for crappy pop music and 3rd rate movies and then shuts down the original service you loved.

If you're addicted to the fringe startup start-page experience, check out recent sites bookmarked "startpage" in Del.icio.us. In between the big guys, you'll find some innovative little players there. The nice thing about RSS services like this is that it's not hard to move at least your reading list from one service to another. The user experience though, as YourMinis users no doubt are aware, is much harder to reproduce.

Update: AOL emailed the following response.

Goowy is not shutting down
yourminis, but has made a decision to close the startpage and remove
some of the functionality of the gallery. Goowy's core focus is creating
widgets and working with developers to create widgets that can live and
work on sites across the Web, including startpages such as iGoogle,
myAOL and Netvibes. By shutting down the yourminis startpage and some
of the functionality of the gallery, Goowy can continue to focus on its
core business -- developing new widgets.

I thought there might be some confusion about yourminis/Goowy shutting
down completely based on the headline of your post, and want to make
sure it's clear that it is just the startpage and gallery functionality.

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.

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."