My Yahoo start page gets new beginning

Yahoo announced Thursday a new beta version of its My Yahoo personalized start page, which it will begin gradually rolling out over the next few months.

Only a limited number of Yahoo members will be able to opt into the beta until the full version becomes available. Yahoo is touting a variety of more sophisticated customization and control tools: users can drag and drop modules for news, weather, games and the like; choose from a broader range of themes and backgrounds; and roll over pop-up previews to display additional information. The overall template has been expanded to four columns, which according to Yahoo is to accommodate more content.

Yahoo is also highlighting the new sharing features in the My Yahoo beta. These allow users to share either specific components of their start pages--like news stories and games--or the customized page's entire contents. Sharing is accommodated via e-mail with a drop-down form that does not require leaving the original page.

Beta testers will have access to a pre-created My Yahoo page based around other Yahoo services that they use: members who use Yahoo's shopping services, for example, will see a shopping module, whereas members who spend time playing Yahoo Games will see more games widgets. The beta's interface has been designed to better synchronize with the look and feel of the main Yahoo home page, as well as Yahoo's mobile service.

The revamp of My Yahoo, an early player in the personalized home page market, comes amid increased competition: one of its own executives moved to start-up Pageflakes last month, and Google released an updated version of its Desktop software on Wednesday.

[doseas]

MyYahoo Beta Start Page

One can only hope that they don't screw it up as badly as they did their Yahoo! TV Listings... it went from one of the best online listing pages to the worst. 90% of the functionality in the new site is still broken several months after the launch.

[sargento]

Yahoo fixes it's present clients

Every time Yahoo fixes something, or offers something new, my Yahoo Friends list, or Yahoo web pages take a beating. They seem to hire wunderkind technicians who are high=school dropouts, and they are running current Yahoo faithfuls away to others.

[pascalgaulin]

And what about Yahoo! Photo and other forgotten services ???

Unnecessary modification to My Yahoo while the urgent revamping of other existing services get forgotten once again... For example, Yahoo! Photo has been a complete mess since they modified the Yahoo! Briefcase service many years ago...

There was a time when Yahoo was a very innovative company in terms of Web services. Today, they seem to be followers rather than leaders and they did not pay enough attention to improving the quality of some services they were often the first to offer.

This is too bad because I believe Yahoo! is still a great company with huge potential and I'm sure that putting it on the right track is only a matter of using (or recruiting) the right people at the right positions...

[Ilgaz]

Horrible

I have right to say it is an horrible idea which would cost Yahoo without any returning back.

I am using My Yahoo as start page since 1998, the reasons people keep it as start page are:
1) It is plain HTML (with some javascript tricks)
2) Compatible with ALL browsers as long as they are new.
3)Massive information in a single page (look at those huge ads in new version!)

This is an amazing mistake by Yahoo, remember this for a while.

[Ilgaz]

Breaking news? Safari NOT supported

I managed to get into the cm.my.yahoo.com page with Safari (doesn't even appear on opera, blank) and it says "Sorry your browser is not officially supported" and suggests using IE or Firefox.

Can't say a word, amazing.

[fratotti90]

http://fratotti90.googlepages.com/ting%26tang

[edcolonna]

This new my yahoo page sucks. I was very satisfied with the old one. I am going to switch to igoogle. My yahoo makes my computer behave erratically and way too slow. when I click a link I demand immediate results. I had that with the old page. Now you can just shove it in an orifice of your own and I don't care which.