A significant redesign is finally coming to the Yahoo.com home page, one of the most well-traveled destinations on the Internet, and the company's search page will follow suit starting next month.
Yahoo plans to let people in the United States start selecting a new, more personalized version of the home page beginning Tuesday afternoon. The revamp lets people select basic applications to use not just Yahoo sites, but also others' such as eBay, Facebook, and Twitter, said Tapan Bhat, Yahoo's senior vice president for consumer experiences.
These applications are available on the left side of the page under a customizable section called My Favorites; hovering over them with the mouse pointer makes each application and its accompanying advertising pop up.
"We're pulling together everything about the user they care about, be it on Yahoo or off, to create a personally relevant experience," Bhat said. "In a world like this, Yahoo needs to make the user experience come first."
The effort is a centerpiece of Yahoo's effort to revitalize its core business: showing content and accompanying advertisements to a large, general audience on the Net. Yahoo's profitability for years has trailed that of its main rival, Google, which depends chiefly on search ads for revenue, and Yahoo faces increasing pressure from Microsoft's online business and new arrivals such as Facebook as well.
Yahoo's new home page permits applications from Yahoo or others. This shows use of Facebook.
(Credit: Yahoo)The company also hopes for more success with advertisers. "We're creating great opportunities for advertisers to target content and context," he said, demonstrating a movie application that showed a prominent ad along with movie showtimes locally tailored for a particular user.
The My Favorites feature will arrive on Yahoo's search page, too, making the search site and results shown on it into more of a portal to access content. Yahoo faces search pressure from dominant Google and now to a certain extent from Microsoft's Bing, too. Even if it consummates a possible search and advertising deal with Microsoft, being able to show its own display ads in applications adjacent to search results could help the company extract more money from its search operation.
Long-coming changes
Newer Web sites change rapidly, but Yahoo proceeds at a relatively glacial pace to change its site, visited by a whopping 340 million people monthly.
Yahoo announced the new front page plan in October 2007, recognizing that people wanted to get to other destinations on the Net besides Yahoo's. It began "bucket testing" it a year afterward, trying variations of the new page on randomly selected users, some of whom squawked at the changes and their inability to revert.
New Chief Executive Carol Bartz has been trying to light a fire under the company's developers, but even this revamp is only is the beginning beta testing on Tuesday. The change will arrive in the U.K., France, and India later this week, in Spain and Mexico next month, and in Asia next year, Yahoo said. Users had no choice about earlier tests, but now they'll be able to select it as default on their own by visiting http://yahoo.com/trynew or clicking on Yahoo promotions for the change.
Yahoo's revamped front page.
(Credit: Yahoo)"The home page was tested by thousands and thousands of people. We got tons of feedback--tens of thousands wrote about what they liked and didn't," Bhat said. "It was really key to helping us figure out what worked and didn't."
The new home page will become default for others when beta testing is done "in the coming months," Yahoo said. The revamped search pages will enter bucket testing in August, meaning that users can't choose to use or not use the new design.
More changes
Opening up Yahoo's content to other sites' operations--and letting other sites use Yahoo data can use such as Facebook-like status updates--is part of the Yahoo Open Strategy. That effort, under way for well over a year, is designed to increase users' activity on Yahoo, to draw more people to Yahoo, and to make the company a better partner for advertisers.
There are about 60 applications available now, and more are being added daily, Bhat said. Users can create their own, too.
Also coming in August will be the ability to select what type of news people can see, with a slider that moves on a spectrum between "fun" and "serious," he said.
In addition, Yahoo is revamping its mobile site. One big feature: when users customize Yahoo for use with regular computers, that customization will carry over to their mobile version.
Bhat wouldn't share details about whether the new home page fares better, either in terms of user engagement or revenue. However, because Yahoo plans to make its official home page announcement Tuesday while detailing second-quarter financial results, it's possible Bartz may be more forthcoming than Bhat.
Bhat did indicate, though, that things are moving in the right direction for the company.
"Our experience in our test indicates that people are excited about this home page. They feel this meets their needs and is fresh new look for Yahoo," Bhat said. "We are designing the page around users. What we do know when design page that users like, they tend to get more engaged."
Yahoo is testing another redesign of its home page, emphasizing news feeds and applications as well as search results.
Yahoo's latest home page redesign (click for larger version).
(Credit: Yahoo)The company is testing the most recent design with certain users, and while it's somewhat similar to Yahoo's current look and feel, it is a bit of a departure from the most recent plan for a redesign shared by Yahoo in March, as noted by PaidContent.org. For example, the new design calls out the top 10 search results at a given time in the upper right-hand corner of the site, a box that appears at the absolute bottom of Yahoo's current site and that was absent from the March mock-ups.
Yahoo also dropped the gray color on the left side rail of the page in favor of a white background, while also adding more choices for users to add feeds from their favorite Web sites and services. That rail also includes applications developed for the Yahoo page that let users check auction results on eBay, for example.
No time frame was given for the arrival of the new design, but further tweaks are probably not out of the question. Yahoo also announced that its mobile site redesign is out of beta and rolling out to a wider audience.
Last week, my iGoogle home page suddenly got a new look via the addition of a pane on the left side containing shortcuts to my widgets. I didn't ask for the new arrangement, and I can't find a way to make the new left pane disappear.
What's worse, when I now click my Gmail in-box, I get an abbreviated version of the application, minus a search box and other useful features. To see the whole enchilada, I have to click the Launch Full Gmail link in the top-right corner of the window. Huh?
The upshot is that the change motivated me to check out my home page alternatives. For the last couple of years, I have used Netvibes as the home page on one of my browsers and iGoogle on the rest. (I rotate between five or six different browsers, just so I don't fall into a rut.) I also took a look at Pageflakes, Symbaloo, and the Delicious social-bookmarking site.
While each of the services offers something unique to Web denizens, I ultimately returned to iGoogle--even with the funky left pane and dumbed-down Gmail module. The difference makers were the ability to see my Google Calendar, (crippled) Gmail in-box, Google Reader feeds, and Google Docs files all in the same window. iGoogle was the only service that manages this trick.
Here's a quick look at the Pageflakes and Netvibes custom-home page services. Tomorrow, I'll cover the beta test version of the new Symbaloo service, Delicious, and the new-look iGoogle.
Pageflakes gets you custom info in a flash
If you don't want to mess around with registration, Pageflakes will serve up information to order in just a few seconds. Just click the big link at the top of the page to open a menu listing about a dozen categories, including news, sports, tech, movies, and gossip.
Choose the categories of information you want to see on your Pageflakes page.
(Credit: Pageflakes)You can add "flakes" of all descriptions to your home page, or create several themed pages that you can jump between by clicking their tabs. If you register with the site, you're prompted to allow the service to search your Web mail contacts to connect with friends and colleagues who also have Pageflakes accounts. I passed on this social aspect of the site.
While I was able to place widgets showing my Gmail in-box and Google Calendar, I struck out trying to do so for Google Docs and Google Reader. Still, you'll find "flakes" of every description at this service. It may not sound like it, but that's a good thing.
Netvibes has the interface edge
In terms of content and features, there really isn't much of a difference between Pageflakes and Netvibes. Two things give Netvibes the edge: a better-looking interface and the lack of "sponsored" widgets.
Netvibes' themes give your custom home page a polished look.
(Credit: Netvibes)You can customize the look and layout of both services, but the Netvibes themes appealed to me more than those available for Pageflakes. (Neither service offers the number and quality of interface options you get with iGoogle, however.) And while you can move Pageflake's ad widget to the bottom of your customized window, you can't delete it entirely.
Tomorrow: a look at Symbaloo, Delicious, and iGoogle.
Google on Monday invited programmers into a new sandbox that will let them test out significantly expanded possibilities for Web gadgets, small applications that can be hosted on the company's iGoogle personalized home page.
The sandbox, available at Google's iGoogle developer page, lets developers get started with a number of new features that eventually will make their way to the regular iGoogle home page, said lead product manager Jessica Ewing.
Among those new features are a left-hand region of the Web browser that lets users navigate quickly through a list of gadgets, a "canvas view" that can give gadgets more screen real estate, and the ability to take advantage of some social features for gadgets that employ OpenSocial standards. OpenSocial is an API, or application programming interface, that lets a gadget run on Web sites, such as MySpace.com, Ning, Salesforce.com, and Friendster, that support OpenSocial.
For example, with the features, somebody using a Pac Man game gadget could both expand the game to full-screen size and, when not playing, use OpenSocial's notification abilities to hear when a friend beat the high score, Ewing said.
"It makes the home page environment a lot more interesting and engaging," Ewing said.
Google has Yahoo on the defensive, but Yahoo has a bigger lead with its My Yahoo portal site than Google does with iGoogle. Other home page sites include NetVibes and PageFlakes, which was just acquired by LiveUniverse.
Ewing wouldn't say when the new abilities would be available to regular iGoogle users. "There are no firm dates yet. We're hoping soon," she said.
More details are available on the Google Code Blog and an explanatory YouTube video.
Google's news arrived the day before the Web 2.0 Expo begins. The timing was coincidental, but no doubt Web 2.0 programmers will be interested.
Got late word from Yahoo today about the company's new update of My Yahoo, due to roll out at 9:00 PM PDT tonight. As it turns out, I already have access to the features. So this report is based on hands-on access to the new service. We also covered an earlier version of the new My Yahoo back in March.
My Yahoo now has a slick pop-down window for adding new page elements.
(Credit: CNET Networks)There are a few new modules available to My Yahoo users, like improved calendar and bookmarks widgets. The biggest update, though, is a new method to update your personal page, called "inline personalization." Now you don't have to hop to a new page to select a module and add it. Instead, a little window drops down over your page and any changes you make are immediately reflected on your page, still visible underneath. It sure beats going to a separate page, as Google's personal page, iGoogle (news) makes you do whenever you want to add content.
Yahoo's new implementation of home page personalization is quite good. The menu that opens up over your home page is clear and easy to use. But inline personalization is not unique. Both Netvibes and Pageflakes (roundup) let you add content to your personal page without jumping away from where you are. Furthermore, Netvibes and Pageflakes also let you add RSS feeds by entering in just the URL of the site. Yahoo has a good directory of popular blogs that can be added with just a few clicks, but adding feeds not in the list requires that you find the complex URL of the RSS feed itself and paste that in.
I would still recommend the new My Yahoo, especially to nongeeks. It's simple but capable, it's slicker than Google's personal page, and it does most of the stuff that the upstart home page services offer. Personally, though, I am sticking with Netvibes. There's no killer feature in My Yahoo that makes me want to switch back to it (I used it for years until I got hooked on Netvibes), and it's too tedious to add RSS feeds to Yahoo.
Update, 5/17/07: You may have trouble getting to the new features today. Apparently the debut isn't going super-smoothly, and it's not happening all at once. My contact at Yahoo dropped me this note last night after I posted the above evaluation: "The rollout of new features did begin tonight but it will be gradual and complete tomorrow."
Google is renaming its personal home page iGoogle tonight. Google is also adding a new tool called Gadget Maker that helps people create their own widgets for use on their iGoogle page. The Gadget Maker comes with seven templates, including two media gadgets to pull in content from YouTube and online and offline photo collections. Users will also be able to organize their personal space with a countdown timer and a simple 10 item to-do list. There's also a free-form widget that lets a user mix together various media such as text and pictures.
This is a step in the right direction for Google's personalized home page efforts, although not nearly as fast as some of its competitors in the single page aggregation space. Netvibes has recently come out with branded content pages, and Yourminis has taken the widgets off the browser and onto the desktop using Apollo. I'm still not a big fan of Google's layout, which feels a little boxy and restrictive, but the new themes have spiced things up.
The new features are set to launch at 9 p.m. PST tonight.
Google's new make-your-own-gadget selection features seven new gadgets that can be customized by the user.
(Credit: Google)
Netvibes, maker of the single-page aggregator (or metagator) that I favor, is making an aggressive announcement at the Web 2.0 Expo. The company is launching the "Netvibes Universes" project. It's a simple technical improvement to the current service, but it's a bit of a business coup.
Netvibes Universes allows content creators to create custom Netvibes aggregation pages. What's technically new is that content owners can now customize the look and feel of their pages, and publish them as standalone Web pages with semifriendly URLs (for example: www.netvibes.com/icecube). Fully friendly URLS--in other words, custom Web addresses--will come later.
The business coup is that Netvibes signed up over 100 publishing partners, including recording artists like Mandy Moore and 50 Cent, and major media like Time, USA Today, and The Washington Post. All their Netvibes pages will be available on Monday.
It's hard to say if the Universes pages be better than their publishers' own home pages. They are different. A custom-designed home page can really stand out, but with more people finding content through "side doors" like blog posts, Digg, and aggregators like Netvibes, the front pages of content sites matter less than they used to. It makes sense, then, for some publishers to use off-the-shelf services like Universes to publish front pages that are almost as attractive, and far easier to modify, than all the individually coded front pages that sites now support.
Time magazine's current home page
(Credit: Time)Netvibes told me that it will make the Universes functionality available to all its users by June. At the moment, it's possible for ordinary Netvibes users to share a Netvibes page only with other users, and you can't customize the page nor specify a standalone URL for it.
In related news, Netvibes competitor Pageflakes is releasing its Flurry feature at Web 2.0 Expo. By interviewing you about your location and your interests, this update makes it even easier to get started with the service. I interviewed Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen in February. It's a great product--I'd use it if I wasn't already hooked on Netvibes.
Both Netvibes and Pageflakes make better start pages than the majors (Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google), although in the long run that won't matter because the big guys can easily grab the lion's share of traffic. For that reason I think Netvibes' direction is very smart. Instead of focusing on making a better product for individuals, the company is now embarking on a business-to-business strategy, too, and hopes to reach new users not only directly, but through its business clients.
Read on for more preview screenshots from Netvibes.
... Read more
Want to add some pizzazz to your Google personalized home page? This week Google is offering six themes that people can use to decorate their page. Google typically prefers simple, clean, text-only pages for its sites, with the notable exception being the doodle on its main search page. With this announcement Google is recognizing that some people might want to add some some color to their personalized home pages.
The themes include a beach, a cityscape, a Japanese tea house, the four seasons, the sky, and a bus stop. They will change dynamically, depending on the time of day and the weather conditions. For example, the beach scene will show a sunrise or a sunset that corresponds to the local time and the characters in the bus stop theme will hold umbrellas if it is raining.
Yesterday I had a chance to sit down with Pageflakes' new CEO, Dan Cohen. Pageflakes makes a "single page aggregator" service. It's a good site to use as your home page. You can add RSS feeds, widgets, and all sorts of content to the page, and you can set up multiple tabs on your site for different categories of content. [See previous Webware coverage.]
Pageflakes' special power is its community focus. You can easily share your page layouts with other people and even let them modify your pages. Cohen sees Pageflakes as a good service for groups or clubs: people can collect resources from the around the Web to make them available to all their members. Not a bad idea.
Can a small site like Pageflakes compete against Yahoo's configurable home page, My Yahoo (or Google, AOL, or Microsoft)? Cohen admitted that the number of users on his service is quite low. He also said his other upstart competitors (NetVibes, YourMinis, etc) aren't doing much better. But he said his work experience at Google and Yahoo has given him insight into what works and doesn't. And, he believes Pageflakes benefits from being a smaller company. Due to his company's focus and nimbleness, he said, he can build a better mousetrap, and do it faster. One thing he'll never be able to fight is Yahoo's marketing reach, though.
If you want more than what the big sites' start pages offer, Pageflakes is worth checking out. I use its competitor, NetVibes, and I really like it, but they function similarly. Both have a lot of fancy modules you can put on your pages, but I just use them to read my RSS feeds. There is one key difference: Pageflakes loads more quickly.
Play the video for more.
In a keynote speech this morning at the 12th annual Cyberposium at the Harvard School of Business, Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of search products and user experience, addressed various media headlines that suggest that the company's recent product announcements and purchases are all over the map. Not so, says Mayer. In the course of an hour, she laid out four areas that Google has deemed to be important--more content, easier computing, personalization, and better search--then demonstrated how various Google products currently fit into each bucket:
More content
--includes Google Book Search, Blogger, YouTube, and Google Earth
Easier computing
--Municipal Wi-Fi, the Google Pack download, Gmail, Google Bookmarks, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets
Personalization
--Google personalized home page, Google Gadgets, and Google Desktop
Better search
--Google Notebook and Google Custom Search
Of course, when someone lays it out for you, it looks pretty obvious, but until now the four buckets were kind of a mystery. Mayer hinted that more products are being designed or sought for each category and also suggested that more integration among existing products might be possible. Stay tuned.
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