Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Yahoo behind Google in terms of Personalization


Yahoo announced a new beta version of My Yahoo. Here is a screencast. On the Read/WriteWeb blog, Essentially it's Yahoo finally upgrading its long-running personalized homepage, with a new design more closely aligned to yahoo.com, splashes of Ajax and dollaps of personalizationIt will at first be a private beta, with a limited number of users being offered a beta account at http://cm.my.yahoo.com/upgrade. Yahoo's plan is to gather feedback from those early users and then make the My Yahoo! beta more broadly available - with additional features - over the coming monthssome of the new beta features:

  • pre-built personalized page for each user, based on data Yahoo has already gleaned from their usage of Yahoo properties - the design of the page is closely aligned with yahoo.com;
  • Category pages for topics such as cooking, plus "content suggestions";
  • Users can further customize their page with drag-and-drop modules, and new four-column and small search box layouts;
  • Feed previews and a full post reader on the page;
  • Editable Personal Assistant with instant access to things like Yahoo! Mail, horoscopes, local traffic, etc;
  • Redesigned modules from Yahoo! and select partners, with games, music, commerce, sports updates, weather, finance portfolios, TV listings, etc;
  • Sharing feature, enabling users to send their My Yahoo! page or favorite modules to friends and family - note, this is very similar to Pageflakes' sharing feature, only Yahoo told me that their sharing service doesn't require sign-ups;
  • More "new interactive modules" to come
To note that Yahoo is far behind google in terms of personalized Ajax-enabled start pages. Google's Personalized Homepage is an early adopter of Ajax and has already most of the features of the new My Yahoo beta. Moreover, Yahoo plans in the future to integrate Yahoo Widgets with My Yahoo. On Google's Personalized Homepage widgets (gadgets) are already there!

2 comments:

Outsource To Asia said...

I really enjoyed reading your blog post about how you're using the Google and Yahoo search engine results. I'm interested in how you're using this information to help you with your research and it sounds like you're using the personalization features of each service to find the best way to present the information from your research. I really appreciate you sharing this information with the world and I hope to read more of your blog posts soon! Affordable Web Development Services

Sarah J. said...

Wow, I loved reading your post "Yahoo behind Google in terms of Personalization." Your research output is really interesting and I'm so glad someone is doing research on people's personalization preferences. I'm really curious to see how this affects the world and what people will do as a result. I think this is a really interesting topic and I'm glad to see someone has found it interesting as well. Social Media Marketing