Further proving that security through (very, very light) obscurity isn’t a good means of keeping things secret, a new beta version of Yahoo’s Mobile Front Page (generally known as just m.yahoo.com) has been found hiding just one character away from the beta announced to the public back in January.
Where as the public beta can be found at beta.m.yahoo.com, our tipster dug up the new version by instead navigating to beta2.m.yahoo.com. Unfortunately, it seems we weren’t supposed to see this just yet; within a half-hour of us reaching out to Yahoo! for comment, the page had become password protected – but not before we snagged a couple screenshots.
The screenshots you’ll see below are what you’d see on an iPhone – on most other handsets, the new beta will look more like the current standard mobile front page: white backgrounds, light image use, etc. The visual changes of the iPhone version from the first beta to beta 2 are somewhat minimal – at least, they’re much less extreme than the jump made between the current m.yahoo.com and the first beta. They’ve decreased the gloss on the gradients, but have rounded out the corners. They’ve also added in a spot for advertisements above the fold, which I don’t remember being there before.
More notable than visual tweaks, however, is the addition of Yahoo’s oneConnect and onePlace. oneConnect brings in the notifications and updates from your e-mail accounts (Gmail, Windows Live, Yahoo) and social networks (Facebook, Flickr, Myspace, Twitter, Dopplr, and a bunch of others), and allows you to update your status at all appropriate sites in one quick swoop. onePlace is a similar all-in-one concept but for general information, squeezing together news, weather, stocks, bookmarks, RSS feeds, and more.
Both oneConnect and onePlace were announced as downloadable applications in the first quarter of 2008, though it seems that an iPhone version of oneConnect is the only thing to have made it out thus far. This is the first time we’ve seen a browser based version of either.
Oh – and if you’re curious as to what Yahoo had to say on the matter after they locked it up tight: they’re “constantly working on innovations” but they have “nothing to announce anytime soon.”
(I’ve removed a bunch of the status updates from image 2 to keep it from making this page absurdly long. Click the image for the fullsize version.)
[Thanks Matt!]