All New My Yahoo

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1. sd
   

   March 8th, 2007 at 11:35 am

   Still getting used to it, but it’s pretty neat. The URL is http://cm.my.yahoo.com/upgrade

2. People explains this to me...
   

   March 8th, 2007 at 11:40 am

   I don’t understand the concept of WEB 2.0 beta stuff. Why would Stock owned companies used alpha or beta labels if they have hardcore and highly educated engineers?

3. ...some Drifter
   

   March 8th, 2007 at 11:43 am

   it’s not that awe-inspiring.

   it’s simply a customizable homepage - that automatically refines it for you based on geography and past browsing trends

   i guess it can be more of an enlightening experience for the average joe who thinks the system is very smart for knowing various variables about him.

   personally, i’m not a fan of the aggregated homepage.
   brand image and experience gets diluted

4. Zaid
   

   March 8th, 2007 at 11:43 am

   For a second I thought that blue was the default color scheme. Almost made me choke:)

   Yahoo not turning into MySpace is best for world’s sanity.

   –Zaid

5. Smaran
   

   March 8th, 2007 at 11:50 am

   Yahoo! is shunning Indian users.

   “We appreciate your interest in the new My Yahoo! Beta. Unfortunately, this Beta is only open to My Yahoo! users in selected countries.”

   I thought India, Israel and the USA were the countries leading the Web 2.0 boom. Guess we’re not important enough. Meh.

6. Michael Arrington
   

   March 8th, 2007 at 11:58 am

   Smaran - that seems a little ridiculous. Maybe it’s just that we don’t want our secret web 2.0 technology to fall into the hands of Indian developers.

7. Smaran
   

   March 8th, 2007 at 12:02 pm

   Hehe. Michael, at least 50% of all Indians can’t even read, let alone surf Web 2.0 sites and build My Yahoo! competitors.

   You know something, Yahoo! has always been like this. I remember when they first introduced Yahoo! Mail Beta, Indian users were blocked access. I changed my country to the UK and boom, I was logged in. They did a similar thing with the new Yahoo! Photos, too. Odd.

8. People explains this to me...
   

   March 8th, 2007 at 12:08 pm

   First of all, I find the blue theme ugly and hard to understand UI. I have no idea where to click it. I don’t understand it.

   There is no basic needs.
   There is no tech innovations.
   There is nothing there.
   There is nothing new.
   There’s thousands of annoying ads to click on.
   There is uhnnnnn…. no life….
   It’s all same product schemes.

   Please use common sense and always design something new… Stop reinventing web 2.0 graphics.

9. Klim
   

   March 8th, 2007 at 12:09 pm

   “We appreciate your interest in the new My Yahoo! Beta. Unfortunately, this Beta is only open to My Yahoo! users in selected countries.”

   No Canada either.

10. david8
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 12:11 pm

    I just switched to the beta and set things up for 3 columns. Why exactly would I would want an oversized ad PERMANENTLY stuck in the upper right corner slot on my personal homepage from yahoo — when there are much nicer homepages available on the web WITHOUT ads messing things up?

    Yesterday it was netscape with a mediocre product and today it’s yahoo with obtrusive ads. If they aren’t serious about competing, why bother putting these products out?

11. Ian
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 12:13 pm

    Ahhh…but there doesn’t seem to be a way to import an OPML file.

    I’m trying to use the old method (the previous version of MyYahoo!), but it gives me an error…

    It makes it tough to switch when switching is made tough.

12. Matt
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 12:13 pm

    Doesn’t support Safari, either…

    “Download a supported browser for free by clicking one of the links below:
    Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher (Windows)
    Firefox 1.5 or higher (Windows and Mac)”

    Then it says:

    “Like living on the edge?
    You can proceed to the My Yahoo! Beta. However, please note that we cannot provide technical support for your browser. Continue to My Yahoo! Beta”

    Wouldn’t have figured Yahoo would jump on the non-compatible bandwagon…

13. Smaran
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 12:14 pm

    Wow… I can’t believe they’re excluding Canadian users too. It’s almost always the English speaking nations of the world that are allowed in first. Usually in this order: USA, UK, Australia, Canada, and then New Zealand, Singapore and India.

14. Will
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 12:15 pm

    I have been a loyal My Yahoo user for years, and I have to say that I am not too impressed with this. Granted I only played with it for 15 minutes or so, but my first impression is that I will stick to the original until they fix a few things. They need to allow for more themes, allow for multiple widget drag and drop (i.e. I want to grab a chunk of widgets and move them) and for RSS widgets, I would like to be taken straight to the article when I click on it, not to a div layer that gives me a longer summary then if I want to read the entire article, I have to click again and it launches a new browser window. Less clicks=happy customer. I like what Netvibes and Pageflakes offer a little better right now.

15. alex
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 12:18 pm

    I think we are at the tipping point of web 2.0 methodologies, practices and technologies gaining traction with the mainstream content providers. Experience matters and we are starting to see the big players realize that and focus on delivering a better experience.

    With personalized start pages I believe that Yahoo still has a far way to go, however this is a step in the right direction. Personalization is what the web will be all about. Yahoo will also need to educate their members on the function and value of personalized start pages and widgets as a whole. This is good for the entire space.

    Functionally I am sure Yahoo is thinking about allowing their widgets to live anywhere, ie giving people the ability to embed their widgets on their blog, myspace, etc.

    In addition I am curious if Yahoo is looking at integration with their desktop widget platform, Yahoo Widgets. It would be very interesting to see their web widgets running on the desktop and vice versa Yahoo Widgets running in the browser.

    At yourminis.com we currently offer the ability to build personalized start pages, make them private or public, and in addition offer the ability to take any of our widgets and embed them on your blog / myspace, etc.

    In the near future we will also support running our widgets on the desktop with Adobe’s Apollo platform. I think widget portability it critical.

    The next year will be an interesting time for the widget space and I believe we will see a lot happing around the widgetization of content and personalization.

16. carmen
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 12:31 pm

    it claims Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9a3pre) Gecko/20070305 isnt “new” enough and i should upgrade to something newer? sheesh. this build is working just fine. let me in to see this blue zoo, Yahoo!,…

17. Jonah
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 12:31 pm

    As a long time my.yahoo user, this is a great upgrade for 2 huge reasons:

    1) RSS feed options. Now you can set options to each individual feed like content preview displayed and item recency. No more looking at 5 stories from 2 weeks ago.

    2) Modules have adjustable widths. Before, certain modules were designated as either ‘wide’ or ‘narrow’ making a dashboard view without pages of scrolling impossible. Now all modules can be dragged into a narrow or wide column.

    After about 10 minutes of customization I’ve saved what would be thousands of pages of vertical scrolling over the course of a year.

    Now they just need to add Address Book, Calendar, and Notepad. Could do without that top right ad, too.

18. pwb
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 12:40 pm

    I’m not sure I’m that excited about it. The spacing is much worse for Stock Quotes (added company names which puts too much distance between symbols and prices) and news headlines (they all seem to wrap, now).

19. Zack
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 12:45 pm

    I dont’ see any revolution happening at Yahoo… what they released is nothing new. Looks like the smaller startups are (as always) much closer to the user and much more advanced. I’ll stick with Pageflakes, Yourminis or NV.

    Zack

20. Frothy Web Buzz
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 12:53 pm

    *sigh* Several of the modules I had set up on my old page are not working on the new page, including the Ski & Snow Report. That’s a little annoying.

21. carl rahn griffith
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 12:53 pm

    good grief, yahoo! what is the point in releasing a beta that is so slow it’s unusable …?

    tut tut.

22. jefferino
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 1:26 pm

    Wow, this site is dog slow. Doesn’t hold a candle to all the performance and and feature improvements that netvibes has been integrating recently.

23. MR. PUNDIT
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 1:34 pm

    YAHOO IS THE NEW AOL.

24. Michael
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 2:36 pm

    sticking with the good and trusty old my yahoo for now. 18 is right on the stock quotes. takes way too much room and not the way stock traders are used to looking at info. the ad is annoying and it does not support many of my current feeds. I will wait this one out.

25. =bg=
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 3:09 pm

    Yahoo TV—————strike one.
    My Yahoo————–strike two.

    Seriously, did they read the feedback to what they did on TV? So..they go and do it again.

    Yikes. Pass.

26. Erik
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 3:55 pm

    What I like:

    Roll over pop up graphs on stock quotes. Very cool.

    The weather module is better, it’s larger but it gives more information too. It now gives you a few days forecast.

    What I don’t like:

    It’s slow.

    The big ad in the upper right

    My TV listings module takes up 5 times the vertical space it used to.

    TV listings used to cover three hours, it now covers two hours.

    The logos on sports scores, and not team names. Less information, slower load times. More vertical space for less data.

    Sports scores used to present yesterdays scores and todays scores, it no longer does.

    Sports scores used to not waste space telling me that there are now NFL games in March, now it does.

    Overall, the whole point of My Y! is to bring varied information to a single page that is dense with information I care about. The new My Y! page is less information dense than the old.

27. arctanck
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 3:58 pm

    @Klim and smaran

    No UK either! Should I be surprised?

28. egads
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 4:39 pm

    holy hell…tried it…its awfully slow and the ad is huge, plus can’t use google. i’m hightailing it over to pageflakes.

29. Andrew
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 5:23 pm

    Just like the Y! TV Guide debacle, another step backward in the name of improvement. This is a company that has too many smart people spending too much time in meetings with too many “knowledge engineers” or whatever they call them using too little common sense. Very unreadable and barely useful - major disappointment.

30. TopKnot
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 5:31 pm

    What is that word? That “Beta” word? What does it mean? From the comments I read I’m guessing “Beta” means “Yahoo is completely finished perfecting MyYahoo”.

    After doing some research though I find beta means basically a work in progress. Oh, and this work in progress means we don’t feel like installing all these new apps on every server for every part of the world.

    Geez, you’d think that everyone is paying $50 a month for this FREE website that give you more features than almost any other portal out there.

    You’re jaded, spoiled and whine like my 3 year old kid.

31. Dave Winer
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 5:40 pm

    All your Yahoo are belong to us.

32. =bg=
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 6:42 pm

    well, topknot, I pay a lot per month for Yahoo DSL service. So if I want to say this new page is awful—then I can. Thanks.

33. Josh
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 7:33 pm

    I think it has amazing potential.

    It never ceases to amaze me how little imagination people have. Like a bunch of little kids.

34. Bill
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 7:34 pm

    Indian and Canadian users, I’ll take you. Come on over here.

    http://www.myownsite.us

    Oh, just ignore the last couple of letters on the domain name,

35. Tom Chi
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 8:41 pm

    I think if you expand the link bar on the left you should be able to get to your bookmarks in one click.

36. Smaran
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 9:32 pm

    @arctanck: I think you should be surprised. It’s not normal that Yahoo! blocks access to users from the UK & Canada.

37. Dan Cohen
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 11:06 pm

    Mike and TechCrunch Readers:

    Great post and discussion on the new My Yahoo, which I had the pleasure of working on. As many of you know, I’ve since left to become the CEO of Pageflakes.

    Coincidentally, I made a post on the Pageflakes blog yesterday (well before the My Yahoo launch) about how I see personalized homepages and where we’re taking Pageflakes. It’s very relevant to what’s being discussed here, and I’d love to hear what you think, either here on TechCrunch or on our blog:

    http://www.pageflakes.com/Comm.....logPost=48

    Thanks!

38. Prateek
    

    March 9th, 2007 at 6:59 am

    What Smaran says is right. Even he got the order of countries allowed is correct.

    I still can’t understand why companies launch services country wise (don’t they understand what WWW stands for?).
    It is understandable that they cannot launch services in every possible language at one go. But if a language is already implemented, what’s the point in allowing only selected countries to use the service?

    …”Maybe it’s just that we don’t want our secret web 2.0 technology to fall into the hands of Indian developers.”…

    There is no question of some technology falling into Indian hands when half of Web2.0 startups have Indian developers/origin. Some, Zoho office, are almost entirely Made In India.

39. Heather
    

    March 9th, 2007 at 7:02 am

    I agree with TopKnot: Beta = use this for a while until we fix the programming bugs. I abandoned Yahoo a long time ago–I hate the ads in my face and the crappy “sponsored” links for three pages of search results. Personalizing Yahoo’s pre-determined content holds no interest for me. And no Google. What’s the point? Here I come pageflakes….

40. joey
    

    March 9th, 2007 at 7:53 am

    Is it me or are they deemphasizing the adding of your random own rss feeds?

    Also, that wierd ass ‘reader’ ajax pop-up window that seems to becoming more and more popular on ‘homepages’ is more annoying than ever. I’ve been a my.yahoo user since they first came out with it… if this thing in it’s current form is forced on me then I’m out.

    A personalized homepage should be my launchpoint or ‘dashboard’ if you will. This one looks like the beginning of a not so obvious wall garden - like the pre-RSS days.

41. eric
    

    March 9th, 2007 at 7:58 am

    I agree with MR. PUNDIT: YAHOO IS THE NEW AOL. This release is ridiculous in its yawn factor (if not understandable given the extreme pressures inside the firm to capitalize on existing assets including its user base). Someone said a great feature of the myY! release is variable column widths. Exciting how, exactly? This geeky user wants to gain visibility into where it is *going*. This market area has already seen personalization and is moving toward how to integrate more of a social feel. Look at the big acquisitions over the last few years in web2.0; they are not from personalization but from applying social dynamics. Pageflakes points the way toward that (dynamic networking) so that is where this user is placing his (home page) bet to best watch for the future.

42. Danny
    

    March 9th, 2007 at 8:50 am

    I can not believe that Yahoo acquired Del.ic.ous and has still managed to create such a solidly unpleasant bookmarking scheme.

43. Trevir
    

    March 9th, 2007 at 9:28 am

    I agree with a lot of other people that what Yahoo’s doing doesn’t seem like anything new. Variable column widths? Meh. Less efficient layout? Ick. Gigantic ad in the personal info column? Boo.
    I did find it interesting to note that my company, http://www.web2corp.com, has been listed right next to Yahoo on the Web 2.0 Expo patrons page, and a week after we got posted next to them on the Web2.0 Expo page they launch a new My Yahoo! that bears a lot of similarity to something that we’re working on. If you follow the links from our site through, you’ll see the preview video for our upcoming social aggregation site, http://www.YouGetIt.com, The video showcases a number of new features that they’ve added to My Yahoo! page. While YouGetIt.com will have many more features than My Yahoo! does, I was amused that we’re apparently thinking along the same lines.
    All of those commenters who have pointed out that the smaller Web 2.0 startups are making more innovative strides may be missing one of the downsides of being part of a huge, successful company: institutional inertia. All the people who go to My Yahoo! expect a certain look and feel, and you have clearly already expressed that you aren’t happy with the changes that have already been put in place. A new company that can try out new approaches is infinitely more flexible, especially because once you’re a CEO of a publicly traded company, you are practically robbed of your ability to take bold new moves to get new users.
    I think that smaller web2 companies such as pageflakes and my own company, Web2Corp, will always be at the forefront of change on the net until the day when we’re the big companies and some upstart web 3.0 company goes tilting at us to unseat the reigning champion.

44. Jon
    

    March 9th, 2007 at 10:27 am

    This is really cool. Much better than before.

45. Kevin
    

    March 9th, 2007 at 11:09 am

    The widgets are key without these it’s just not a good homepage–Pageflakes has the widgets and keeps adding more. They’re on the right track here. They even have a former yahooer as their CEO. He knows their good and bad and is free to deveop the Pageflakes. Better to be a “Flake” than “hooer”.

46. Bob
    

    March 9th, 2007 at 12:53 pm

    I think the zip code thing is ok but I thought the idea of customizabel startpages was to be able to acess them anywhere. What if I am visiting New York and want to know what is happening there. It is not every conevient when I have to change all my csettings form my home town. I also like the look of Pageflakes better it is clean, neat and kind of old school

47. Mike Malloy
    

    March 9th, 2007 at 1:33 pm

    One-click web page page publishing is very useful. I’m working with PageFlakes to see if I can get everything for a Little League team in one page without any coding. I have made the most progress with PF so far and do not want to put up my own site for this.

48. Eric
    

    March 9th, 2007 at 6:28 pm

    he he. Love the quote from the other eric calling yahoo the new AOL. I hope not as a “Career” yahoo user, but I must say I have started to give Pageflakes a try and like where they are going.

49. OgreSlayer
    

    March 10th, 2007 at 6:32 am

    I started with yahoo as a search engine - switched to google when all yahoo returned was ads. Did yahoo mail - got sick of the spam. Did financal forums on yahoo then last year they released a new version that made everyone leave leaving bashers. Did myyahoo - hated the limitations so I created my own start page on my own website. Now I’ve switched to Pageflakes because it is a lot easier to add rss feeds and share things with family and friends.
    For me, yahoo has failed everytime. I can’t think of one thing that yahoo does that is “best of class”

50. Dave Schappell
    

    March 10th, 2007 at 9:50 am

    Can someone explain why they made the decisions they did with the Bookmarks? Why not allow me to have them as a widget, if I so desire, so that I have one-click linking? And, why force me to always see the Yahoo Services in the dropdown? I find this the only really annoying change they made with the new site.

    I really like where they’re obviously going with integrating a better reader, making it easier to customize widgets and add extra pages. And, it’ll be very nice when I can include any widget from other providers. I’ve been hoping for that all for ages. And, this makes me glad that I’ve stuck with my.yahoo — i was very close to abandoning them a few months ago, but was just too tired to make a clean break

51. jeffc
    

    March 12th, 2007 at 4:29 pm

    As someone who’s been using Pageflakes for a little while now It’s fascinating to see what people are doing with it like Mike Malloy above and his little league team. These community based uses of personalized start pages never occurred to me when trying sites like MyYahoo and the others.

52. mags
    

    March 16th, 2007 at 9:56 am

    Help!!! I’ve fallen into ‘yet another yahoo nightmare’ and I can’t wake up!!!

    I cannot log into my yahoo messenger now, after uninstalling and reinstalling it.
    After leaving Internet Ex and going over to Firefox, my messenger did not work right. So, thought I would try reinstalling messenger….. (big mistake)
    yahoo is truly YAHELL!!!!!!! ARE THEY EVER GOING TO GET IT “RIGHT”??? If anyone has had this kind of problem, let me know on here please!!!!
    Thanks…..anyone elses input would be much appreciated!!!!