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.
