Thursday, March 8th, 2007
My Yahoo! Beta
Category: Showcase
For the three people who do not have Yahoo! ids or if you just want to take a quick gander, you can check out a screencast.
The new feel doesn’t seem as revolutionary as the some of the other upgrades. It is more subtle… and this will probably work to their advantage. There isn’t going to be a backlash of “oh no I just want to always keep my old My Y!” and instead more of a “huh that is nicer”.
You will see lots of inline ajax touches such as editing portlets, bubble tooltips to show more info on an item, quick links, and drag and drop. Drag and drop is still foreign enough that I prefer it when the targets are explicit (a la netvibes and others).
Ben and I have talked about portals, showing My Yahoo!, for a couple of years now. It is great to see what they came up with. My guess is that there is a lot still to come, and once we are on this version they can get more and more creative.
What do you like/dislike from a developer stand point? What would you do differently?
Related Content:
Humm… how is it better than Netvibes? Oh,… I see! there is a big Ad in the middle!
portals are useless
I just checked my Yahoo account and new My Yahoo! Beta.. well looks like a real early beta to me….
Actually I dont see anything that can make you say “Ok, My Yahoo is better than the competition”, they just try to keep up with the rest.
Unfortunately, it appears that we here in the UK can’t see it yet.
I have no use for portals any longer. I now prefer Web-based RSS aggregators, Google Reader in particular, for following content of interest.
Ditto on the Google Reader. Do people really use portals?
For fun, try it with Safari.
I know some people think retro is in but this is absurd! Browser sniffing? Who does that any more?
I hate to hop on the hate wagon, but Yahoo seems to be 1.5-2 years behind everyone else, and can’t exceed that which they’re copying. How do they stay in business?
no yahoo ID. used someone elses and it claimed firefox 3 was too old, and this screencast camtasia page wants flash.
i noticed that in crockfords videos too – they talked about disallowing certain browsers instead of letting them gracefully fail/degrade – seems to be whats been done here
carmen – it doesn’t disallow any browsers – the page that comes up just warns you that the experience might not be optimal with an unsupported browser (which, in the case of Safari, it currently isn’t.) Chalk it up to being an early beta – that stuff will get worked out
No access from Australia either. Apparently I need to upgrade my country of origin :P I wouldn’t stress on the browser compatibility – that is the sort of thing that gets ironed out closer to launch. I applaud any company that reaches out to its users for feedback… even if for now I am excluded from that :)
Heh – portals are so, like, 90′s… On the other hand, it is nice to see them come along. But I am always amazed at how much stuff they can cram onto a page — and still have room for that hugantic ad.
The Beta mail is nice, but takes forever to load initially. Way longer than gmail. I can launch gmail and Google calendar faster than entering Yahoo mail.
So, wioota, are they saying you need to upgrade to Australia 2.0? :),
I prefer netvibes !
That’s because you’re a bitch.
I don’t like the beta page. Give me back my.yahoo.com
BETA SUCKS I USED TO LIKE MY YAHOO but this new version has no edit or switch back i guess i will just set igoogle as my homepage til Yahoo learns not to cram it down our throats NO WONDER YHOO IS GOING DOWN DOWN DOWN AND GOOG IS UP UP UP
I used to try to evenly search between the 2 but now GOOGLE IS MY CHOICE FORGET YAHOO
google has more free stuff anyhow yahoo wants to charge for everything I used to think Yahoo could comeback but now who cares go with Google til Yahoo gives us choices
The new MyYahoo! Beta is ridiculous. None of the Javascript options are available, including the Personalize to revise it to personal preferences. It loads with errors, which do not do away even when my Zone Alarm Security Suite is turned off. It spashes a big advertisement on the left side that I cannot delete (no java).
I have emailed MyYahoo? asking how to revert to the non-Beta version, and got no response.
I agree. No wonder Google is far out in front!
What were they smoking? Ajax is nice, but My.Yahoo has been a perfectly fine, text-based news aggregator. Nice, small links, with a little ajax-type preview. No random flashing stuff. No overdesigned drag and drop nonsense. This new page is form over function to the extreme, and it works horribly. For instance, the old NYT module displays 5 news stories, with a line of text for each. The new one is a snapshot of their homepage. If I wanted to see the NYT homepage, I’d go to nyt.com, thank you very much. Hopefully, Yahoo will see the backlash and at least let us devotees keep the old version. my.yahoo works much better as a homepage than Google News. For now.
Plus, they push the new version on us. One day I see a page which says “take me to my page” (not telling me it is my new page) and “cancel” (which would take me to my old page, but which was not explicated) in very small lettering. Bait and freakin’ switch. Bastards. I almost want to abandon my.yahoo because they have handled this so poorly.
BTW, to switch back from beta to good: http://cm.my.yahoo.com/switch
They don’t tell you that, but at least they make it simple once you know.
Shame on you, Yahoo.
why is Yahoo sending me a greeting on my birthday wishing me a happy birthday? I know no one at Yahoo and could care less if Yahoo wants to wish me a happy birthday using my personal data.
How can I change back??!! The old syle was much better and to the point.
Thanks for the link, John D., on how to switch back to the old format. I just accidentally got sucked into the new format myself, and was convinced I couldn’t get back to my old page if I wanted to. I’ll play with the beta page sometime, but I’d prefer to do that when I’m ready to do it, and not get tricked into switching up before I’m ready.
OH, THANK YOU JOHN D! I thought I was stuck with the new page too and even tried to fix the mess it created with the changed format.
It’s still messed up now that I’ve switched back but some of the things I’ve been missing are now working again! Yea!