Yahoo appears to be quite serious about openness and promoting third party content and applications on their massively visited home page. Today they’re announcing the addition of an eBay widget to the new Yahoo home page, which is still being tested with just a subset of Yahoo users. The widget will be added to the My Applications dashboard area on the left.
eBay users can use the widget to monitor buys and sells, check recent bids and get reminders about auctions that are about to close. They can also search listings without leaving Yahoo.
Yahoo, like AOL, has made a subtle but important shift in their home page strategy. In the old days the home page linked out to other Yahoo pages, or advertisers. Now they’re willing to provide content that users want on the home page, no matter the source. The fact that users can access this eBay widget, presumably without eBay paying a sponsorship fee of any kind, shows Yahoo is willing to put users above revenue (in the hope that happy users will mean more revenue down the road).
By the way, Yahoo sure does love Southwest Airlines. Every screen grab they supply the press with has a big fat Southwest ad in it.
Nice to see that Yahoo is actually trying something different instead of doing the same thing over and over, expecting better results
This is great!
-b
This is awesome!
Very nice
When can you move these around, or add/delete? I could care less about horoscopes. etc.
4 letters: S-I-C-K
Damn i really want to get that new homepage…..some people are too lucky to have it…the old one sucks
I think they are just trying to lower their bandwidth bill. You have to cut corners wherever you can.
Very Desparate. what can you lose when you have already lost.
Lame. This been done before. I heard Myspace and hi5 has something called applications. AOL too.
Showing off Ebay isn’t stewpid. People don’t like ebay anymore. The sellers on ebay are expensive arrogant and thieves like the paypal people. They are out to scam the buyers.
Smart move. Yahoo needs people to come back to it and offering such access to eBay may be attractive to many – eBay has a huge user base.
However, how much stuff can you cramp on your home page? Yahoo’s is quite cluttered already…
Kudos to Yahoo! Good job!
And yahoo is receiving how much of a kickback from ebay?
I can’t believe nobody else is noticing but the kickback is upwards of 60% of eBays take. They are affiliate links.
Yahoo with its platform could present the web on a single web page. Think if Amazon, Netflix, Facebook etc. wanted to put a page on Yahoo the way that ebay has. Is this something people will want? Who knows, but it’s probably Yahoo’s best chance at becoming relevant again. It will be interesting to see if they have the clout to pull it off. Why would other these sites want people to stay on Yahoo and not come to them directly?
_someone_ at Yahoo understands that advertisers care about eyeballs, and current eyeballs really want their online experience to be the way _they_ want it. If they can keep their users happy, they can keep getting paid for ads – simple as that.
At least it’s something different than the dumb YHOO stock price issues we keep hearing about.
This is just fun. Giggles. The Preseason. I really love this website.
No joke.
Hm, this is a great start. If Yahoo can move this to web scale, I think they have a chance at differentiating themselves against Google and moving the game beyond the search war. There is no bigger page on the web than http://www.yahoo.com, and application developers will be eager to participate in the Yahoo platform given the traffic.
While the press is focusing on the CEO and stock drama, I think there are some folks at Yahoo working hard to surprise us naysayers.
Good luck Yahoo. I may stop be stopping by soon for a visit.
I wonder if they’ll have a google search app?
I’ve never been a big fan of the Yahoo homepage (much like many others I’m sure). Its about time they finally embraced something of value for their clients rather than just value for them.
Hey Mike,
I’ve got a different take. At $9.07 Yahoo is looking for coins under the cushions. Yahoo is eBay’s newest super affiliate.
You’re confusing “openness” with “business development”. “Open” is when anybody can put a widget on Yahoo’s home page. Business development is when eBay pays Yahoo millions of bucks for real estate on its home page. There’s really very little genius going on here.
There is a lot of genius here Jeffrey, they’re not promoting “openess”, they’re getting in on the ebay affiliate action. Those are affiliate links and think about it… every “you’ve been outbid” notice now potentially routes through Yahoo!
By promoting AOL and GMAIL access in their interface and merging that with ebay affiliate links they’ve just created a scenario in which Yahoo! will likely snipe mega bucks worth of affiliate earnings… that’s genius!
I wonder how long it’s gonna take to roll the new homepage out.