I’ve been using My Yahoo! as my homepage for about 8 years until recently. Frankly, I’d been disappointed that the service had remained unchanged for a long time and over the last couple of months I’ve been alternating between using Rojo.com and Start.com as my homepage.Well, Yahoo! today very quietly launched a new beta service. I’ve only had a quick play around with the service and here are the new features I’ve spotted:
- More themes and colours
- Much slicker overall appearance
- More content available as modules including the BBC, Boing Boing, slashdot and the WSJ.
- Modules can be moved more easily and each module can be customised more than before
Overall, its a nice improvement but I don’t think it is for me. I think the service is aimed more at users who don’t understand RSS and will select content from the pre-defined choices that Yahoo! have rather than creating their own homepage. At the moment, I still prefer Rojo and Start – Rojo because it lets me stay on top of a lot of feeds at a time, and Start because it’s layout is so flexible and I love the way the MSN search engine is integrated.
I’ll give My Yahoo! a proper run-out this week before I make a final decision on whether or not to dump it permanently.
Update: I’ve had a bit more of a play around with the service and actually it’s a lot nicer than I thought. I’m starting to lean towards using this as my personal homepage.
- Yahoo! Vs Start.com: Although Start allows more control over the layout of the page, Yahoo! offers more modules and each module can be tweaked more. Yahoo! also has better bookmark handling and management
- Yahoo! Vs Rojo: Rojo for me is the ultimate RSS reader…but it doesn’t do anything else.
- Yahoo! Vs Google: Google offers a limited selection of content and services, although it does integrate gmail which is my main email service. I don’t need this though as the Gmail notifier tells me when I have a new message.
I think if I use Yahoo! as my homepage, with Rojo as one of my bookmarks I’ll be sorted.
