Pimp My Yahoo?
I have a confession. I have been a user of “My Yahoo!” since its original release. I was one of the early beta users when beta really meant beta. For some reason that I cannot comprehend, as more sophisticated personalized Web portals and more recently RSS aggregators have developed, I have stayed with the tried and true My Yahoo! – a site that has essentially not changed its look and feel since the last century.
Well watch out.
My Yahoo! is back in beta, and it’s about time. What’s new? First of all, there are some outrageous new styles on offer, like this Leopard-print (incongruously named “faux fur” – as a colleague pointed out, why do they have to call it “faux fur” when it’s on a computer?). Unfortunately, many of the styles on offer are not very readable, and readability of text is pretty important in an application like this. It also offers a reader pane built into the application so you can read full blog entries (for those that publish a full feed) right in My Yahoo! This, and the UI tweaks are probably the nicest features. The other bits, such as a page-dominating animated ad (see upper-left-hand-corner) I am finding a little hard to swallow.
Even as a long time, user I was about to give up and move to Google Reader, Netvibes or Pageflakes. The new release is keeping my attention. I’ll definitely give it a spin around the block, but I’m thinking that what they’ve delivered, feature-wise, may be too little too late.
Liked this post? Follow this blog to get more.
I’m glad I’m not the only My Yahoo user..
:)
Update: One nice new feature is the Facebook module… FlickR integration is nice as well. Stocks and weather are also greatly improved. On the down-side, I’d like more integration into other… you know… Yahoo! things – like Yahoo! groups and Upcoming.org…
More negatives. The new layout (and presumably the Ajax behind it) seems to really confuse the hell out of Safari 3.0.4 on Leopard. For example, the scroll bar disappears whenever you bring up the reader pane, never to return.
Also, the animated Flash ad keeps running my CPU up and making my fan spin, ruining my otherwise tranquil evening.
Hi Dan – have you tried Blogfriends? – Facebook app that gives you a river of posts based on your preferences and social graph.
I have kind of given up trying to keep tabs on specific blogs via a reader and most of the time just sample from the river.
One big disadvantage (for now) is that you can’t add specific blogs to your river.
I hadn’t looked at My Yahoo page in ages…
I was a bit confused by what was new, as I’ve got lots of ‘modules’ on there that when you look at them have RSS feeds available, but don’t show up within My Yahoo’s reader.
e.g. I’ve got a module, “Top Stories from Reuters” that shows up the way it always has: a list of headlines and previews, click on a headline and the new page loads with the article loaded. Click on the module name in My Yahoo and you get this: http://news.yahoo.com/i/578 which has buttons for adding them as modules to My Yahoo, or as RSS feeds.
Adding it as a module keeps the above described functionality, rather than using the cool new reader. Then I try getting the RSS feed and adding it manually, but Yahoo outsmarts me and make it the real Yahoo module.
Most of my modules on Yahoo are news modules, which are available just fine from RSS. I’d love to try their new web based RSS reader for reading them, but they won’t let me. Bah!
OTOH, I could add the feed for your blog to My Yahoo page and finally see the new reader interface. Looks nice, but lack of keyboard controls makes me still prefer Google reader.
-M
Gah! The goddam video inset flash ad keeps overlaying the built-in RSS reader. Very annoying!