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August 23, 2007

New York Times Launches…MyYahoo

Michael Arrington

19 comments »

The New York Times took their personalized home page product out of beta today - see it here. The look and feel is about the same as it was a a year ago when it went into private beta - Think MyYahoo, Pageflakes or Netvibes, with the New York Times logo and without the widgets.

There’s an argument that the product will bring customized home pages to the masses, although frankly Yahoo has already done a good job of this with well over 50 million users. This will be particularly useful for people who live, eat and breathe the New York Times, but others may find it a bit much.

Users can also add pre-selected non-NYT content or their own favorite RSS feeds, and modules can be dragged around the page, just like every other customizable home page.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. wayne lambright

    August 23rd, 2007 at 5:39 pm

    I love it, good job to the team at the NY times. I do love reading the NY times, but only about once a month, with my new “My Times” I’m sure to visit more.

  2. kent

    August 23rd, 2007 at 5:43 pm

    zzzzz…big deal…another old media(dying) company trying to reinvent itself (survive) as a new media company by copying new media startups. Please refer to Netscape’s attempt at emulating digg.com

  3. Julian

    August 23rd, 2007 at 5:51 pm

    MyYahoo? Shouldn’t this be MyTimes?

    Anyway, you make a good point about people who live and breathe the NYT, they’ll definitely find this enjoyable.

  4. Ian

    August 23rd, 2007 at 6:29 pm

    It’s interesting to see the NY Times trying to stay with the times, ha!

    Ultimately though I probably won’t use this service but I do respect the NYT for all of the heavy lifting reporting that they do. I look forward to them making this into something that I would use.

  5. mrshl

    August 23rd, 2007 at 7:27 pm

    Basically, they’ve implemented a clean, attractive, and smooth-rendering starting point for their own content. That’s a pretty good approach for a site with as much proprietary content as they have. Every NYTimes reader has their own reasons for visiting, and now readers can easily create a customized filter with a pretty face.

    This might not offer the breadth of features provided by Google, Netvibes, or Pageflakes, but it’s more stylish than all three. And it feels faster. As for recreating MyYahoo, that might not be such a bad idea. Yahoo’s own startpage redesign effort (currently in beta) elevates advertising over the user experience, and it seems bloated in comparison.

    I used MyYahoo! for 10 years, but since they’ve decided to abandone their strength, I’ve gone looking for replacements. At this point, Google Reader and Popurls.com are my top choices. But I’ll definitely be using My Times to access the NYTimes, which I suspect, is the point.

  6. B.Ackles

    August 23rd, 2007 at 8:02 pm

    What technologies are used to generate this framework. iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, MyYahoo!; they all seem to have a similar look and feel. Any developer with a clue?

  7. Digital Lifescapes

    August 23rd, 2007 at 8:37 pm

    I find it hard to imagine that after “nearly a year in beta” this is the end result.

    Perhaps those people who have never used a customizable home page template would find this NYT launch “newsworthy” (pun intended). I don’t.

  8. David Mackey

    August 23rd, 2007 at 9:36 pm

    There are too many of these companies! They should focus on utilizing the existing applications instread of expending time and money into efforts that are too limited.

  9. B.Ackles

    August 23rd, 2007 at 10:10 pm

    Well, I did a little research and clearly AJAX is the bread and butter of these sorts of frameworks. I’m just wondering why they all look nearly identical. Even Facebook uses this sort of click and drag architecture; only they’ve served a niche!

  10. AC14

    August 23rd, 2007 at 11:54 pm

    Actually, I think they did an extraordinary job.

    my.nytimes is much cleaner and faster than both the new my.yahoo, and google homepages (tho certainly not as many “modules” yet).

  11. abarrera

    August 24th, 2007 at 2:00 am

    Well, it surely looks like myYahoo. One thing nobody has mentioned is their registration procedure. Most sites send you a confirmation email so you can activate your account. In this case, I was redirected directly to myNYTimes page without a confirmation. Great method to spam someone, specially with all the newsletters they offer!!!

    After 1 year and they can’t get this right.. gets me thinking…

    About the technology, it’s for sure our favorite mix of ajax, but I’m also curious if they’re using some kind of widget framework or toolkit.

  12. David Moss

    August 24th, 2007 at 2:24 am

    Another start page offering white labelled services is Protopage

  13. leds

    August 24th, 2007 at 5:41 am

    seems not friendly to Firefox

  14. abarrera

    August 24th, 2007 at 7:25 am

    hmm leds, it’s working for me (FF 2.0.0.5 on Linux). Pretty cute that protopage, although the popups on the feed widgets are quite annoying. At least at first, while you try to work out the page.

  15. Rocky

    August 24th, 2007 at 7:32 am

    It works fine for me on Firefox, too. (Windows Vista)

    The most interesting part of My Times is that you can pick from modules selected by Times journalists. Want to know what David Pogue is reading? You can click to see that he recommends Engadget, AppleInsider, Slashdot, Gizmodo and his own stuff. (Unfortunately, I can’t link to this page.) These pages are good resources that would be even more useful if they provided direct links to the RSS feeds so that you could subscribe with your preferred personal home page or news reader.

  16. Joe

    August 24th, 2007 at 9:10 am

    I’d love to use this, but it doesn’t seem to work on IE at work. And this is a corporate network, no funny-business on these machines, so I’m a bit surprised, considering this is the only website I’ve encountered here that has crashed the browser.

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