Paid Content: Verdict on New Yahoo Home Page

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What’s this?

A review of Yahoo’s new home page design, currently available as an opt-in beta. “After spending some time trolling around the new Yahoo.com, I think there’s a strong possibility that the redesigned home page will fall short of its lofty goal of being the ‘center of people’s online lives.’”

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  1. The only decent “hub” site I can think of is Facebook, and even then it’s largely throwaway stuff.

    I’m pretty well convinced hubs are a dead end, not least because they try to glue a lot of unrelated stuff onto the same cat. I can’t see what millions of people would want with a page that collects contextless previews of several dozen properties, little of it particularly relevant to the user.

  2. But what if everything WAS related to the user, and the user’s life? Then no matter how “unrelated” the content was, it would have something in common: its relevance. I designed something like this up about a year ago, if anyone has an interest:

    Link

  3. Evan: At first glance, I was a little skeptical of the concept you linked to. It looks a little like Netvibes, which I find to be totally useless. But then I looked closer and started clicking around, and I changed my mind. It’s neat. I’m pretty sure I’d use this, and I don’t have that feeling with most portals.

  4. @Evan

    I’m with Khoi here, both that Hey Look Out! appears much more usable than most similar sites I’ve come across, and that I’d give it a shot if it launched.

    @all

    Yahoo! is to me what the ugly girl is to the pretty girl: a social moat. I don’t search with Yahoo!, I can’t bear to go to their homepage, the AJAX expansion upon hovering over the Yahoo! Mail button grates on my nerves, and neither of their mail interfaces works particularly well. I use Yahoo! Mail to filter crap, and use the classic UI because it’s reliable and quick.

    </rant>

  5. I don’t know if I can agree with you. Page looks fine, clear and some people would even call it attractive. There are many kinds of people and I think that always launching new site is some sort of a risk. Some people would not like it, some will love it. Who will be in majority? I don’t know but for me the most important thing is that the page looks really clear and for yahoo users that may be the clue. I’m not saying that the site will become smash hit, maybe it is truth that it will fail to live longer than a month but I’m just not sure about that.

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