(upgrade URL)launching today at 11 am PST. This is the web’s most popular
customizable home page by far, with 50 million or so worldwide users
and half of the total market (the other half is controlled by Netvibes,
GoogleIG, Pageflakes, Live.com and others). So when they make a change, it affects a lot of people.
I had the opportunity to meet with Tapan Bhat (VP, Front Doors) and
David White (Director, My Yahoo) and see a demo of the new product
yesterday. There is also a screencast of the demo here, led by White.
The new My Yahoo has been redesigned to look more like the recently updated Yahoo homepage.
But the most significant changes are are under the hood. Instead of
presenting a default set of content to new users to start them off, My
Yahoo is now analyzing known data about the user (zip code from IP
address and the areas of Yahoo that the user visits often) to create a
customized version right at signup. So, for example, if the user tends
to go to the Yahoo Movies property occasionally, a Yahoo Movies module
will be auto added when they create a new My Yahoo account.
Yahoo is also adding new sharing features. Any page that a user
creates can be shared with other My Yahoo users via email or IM. If
accepted, that page is added to the new user’s My Yahoo account as
well. In the future, the team says, they’ll be allowing users to
publish their own pages, as Pageflakes does today.
Users can also choose between a 2, 3 or 4 column layout and a number of themes.
There are a couple of areas where My Yahoo is still lagging
competitors like Netvibes. Widgets cannot be added to the site,
although that is coming eventually, the team says. Users also can no
longer have bookmarks linked right from the main page - that feature
has been moved to a drop down control panel. That makes some sense from
a user interface perspective, but I’ll miss being able to access
bookmarks with a single click. Finally, My Yahoo has a large ad unit on
the site that cannot be removed - something none of the other services
force on users.
Overall this is a very welcome step forward for My Yahoo. And from
what the team is saying, there are a lot of additional features to be
rolled out in the near future as well.
Like most Yahoo product upgrades, this is being rolled out to users
slowly. If you’d like to test it out, you can create an account or
upgrade your existing one at cm.my.yahoo.com/upgrade.
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