Guest post from Porter Novelli UK’s digital Ambassador, Nick Scargill.
Back in the late 90’s when my friends and family first got the internet there was a rush to get an email address. Not only did this give us a new way to contact our friends far and wide but also gave us an excuse to use the web on a pay per minute basis, which was still relatively lacking in content. Back then there were a couple of major players when it can to online email along with many who were there one week and gone the next. My first email address was with Yahoo.co.uk and ever since then I have had a soft spot for Yahoo!
This admiration for Yahoo! has been under attack in recent years as Google introduced its Gmail email, then maps and street view along with a whole host of other services. While this was going on Yahoo! Was starting/creating and then failing to develop its social media sites with Yahoo 360 closing while Google bought Bebo. All of this led me to feel as thought I was backing a dying giant with my yahoo account as more and more things required my Gmail login.
However, this all changed last week for two reasons. The first was the announcement that the Yahoo! homepage was going under a major transformation. The second was actually trying this updated homepage rather than going straight to the Yahoo! mail home page. If you haven’t yet tried the new and improved Yahoo.com then you should go and have a look (make sure you click at the top to activate the new page). Rather than the improvement being the addition of many new ‘features’ the page now has a simpler, smarter appearance than before. There are new features included of course but they are the sorts that are useful and actually get you staying for longer on Yahoo.com longer before moving off on a search adventure.
Down the left hand site there is no longer the list of Yahoo services, which has been replaced by a ‘My Favorites’ column. This is of limited use until you log in, when this column transforms with all of your cutomised ‘apps’ appearing and logged in. The ‘My Favourites’ apps include everything from a Facebook app through to RSS readers for the site you visit most often. Like a Friend Feed page but on your search homepage. So before you start your search you can check TFL and update your status. Not sure if Wired has posted a new story in the last hour? Well you can quickly check on the Wired app and see if it there is and then click and go straight to it.
So rather than the new Yahoo! trying to persuade you to sign up to more services it is helping to collate your ‘online life’ in to one simple easy to access page. It would be interesting, if you had the time, to see how much time this saves you from going to the individual sites or having them all open and slowing your browser down. The new Yahoo! makes me feel proud once again to have a Yahoo! email address, what will be interesting moving forward is to see if these changes are backed up by other improvements. But one thing is for sure, its useful, neat and you can change the colour too.
content, Google, Yahoo!
I don’t think Google ever bought Bebo. If I remember rightly, Bebo was bought out in a big AOL deal last year.
Yahoo! 360 may have failed, but the companies social media sites have been anything but unsuccessful. Services like Flickr and Delicious are still very active and are the de facto brands for photo sharing and social bookmarking respectively.
Whoops, typo there! “company’s” even! Monday morning for you!
You’re correct Dan, it was AOL not Google who purchased Bebo, my mistake thanks for pointing that out. Your point about Flickr and Delicious makes sense, however, unlike Google there is not as much integration between them all, which the new Yahoo! homepage helps with.
Good point. Delicious and Flickr are pretty much siloed. I’m loving the Google Connect service, I’m hoping it’s going to become fully mainstream at some point – I hate signing in to different sites with countless log-ins!