Sunnyvale, California — In what could be regarded as the most sweeping changes yet to its front page, Yahoo Inc., on Thursday moved ahead in full swing with a promised homepage makeover — making changes that give users a personalized view of the wider Web, intended to revitalize its popular but financially stumbling website.
“Random users in selected countries are testing the new page.”
The pioneering California Internet firm is allowing randomly selected users in Britain, France, India and the United States test a “next generation design” of a homepage used by more than 400,000 people worldwide, besides adding the capability to play back full songs in response to a music search.
“We are working on a new homepage that will help you get more out of the Internet, make more of your precious time, and make sense of all the things going on in your world,” Yahoo vice president of Front Doors said in an online posting.
Yahoo said Wednesday it has also supplied a dashboard area that will allow users to preview their favorite Yahoo and non-Yahoo services, including Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, Gmail, weather forecasts and local events.
“The Web has evolved to keep us in continuous communication, but this also means we are constantly receiving e-mails, text messages, RSS feeds, tweets and IMs. Keeping up can be a struggle,” Tapan Bhat, Yahoo’s senior vice president of front doors, communities and network services, said in a blog post. “We plan to add plenty more preview applications in the future, so that you do not have to spend as much time jumping from site to site just to stay plugged in.”
The Internet media giant is under the gun to deliver on year-old promises to transform Yahoo from a network of more or less insular properties into “starting points” that help consumers quickly navigate their way to the rest of the Web.
“We are going to put what matters to you most at your fingertips,” said Bhat, the main destinations at Yahoo, including Yahoo.com, MyYahoo and the Yahoo toolbar.
Yahoo’s forthcoming upgrade features slight resemblance to the existent My Yahoo page, except in a couple of critical respects: Naturally, the Yahoo search field is the paramount item on screen, and the left-hand navigation pane is where the new Yahoo and the present My Yahoo are most similar. In My Yahoo (and the standard home page), a quick-links bar connects users to Yahoo’s other services; in the new Yahoo home page, that component has become the “My Applications” dashboard. It links to the same services, however in the redesign, the user defines which links are shown, and contents are no longer limited to Yahoo properties.
For example, the “Mail” tab will not simply link to a user’s Yahoo mailbox as it presently does, but it will provide a preview of mailbox contents for Yahoo, AOL, and Gmail accounts, with support for more services pending.
Specifically, Yahoo said it plans to add more content from across the Web to the site and eventually will add information about what a user’s contacts are doing across Yahoo and the Web. The company also plans to open the site to its Yahoo Application Platform so that external developers and publishers can submit their own preview applications to be featured on the Yahoo home page.
Michael Arrington, a blogger at TechCrunch, noted that because 314 million people visit the Yahoo home page each month, any change will “ripple broadly” across the Internet.
In its simplest sense, Yahoo is blending the broadcast, editorially-controlled view that Yahoo.com has long offered with the personalized, self-selected view of information that the company’s MyYahoo service has long offered. It mixes things users know they want, with the serendipitous or unexpected.
“For the first time, we are going to marrying those two to take the best of both,” Bhat promised.
While third-party services such as e-mail would be a key addition to the home page, Arrington pointed out that Yahoo opted to “leave Microsoft out of the party,” with no support for its e-mail offerings. He noted that Yahoo said it may add integration of new items on the home page from third-party sources such as the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle.
A spokeswoman said Yahoo planned to invite a random sample of its users amounting to less than 1 percent of audience.
The new home page relies on slick personalization technology that allows users who have signed into their Yahoo account to see when new information arrives not just on Yahoo sites, like e-mail or news, but off-Yahoo on sites such as eBay Inc. auctions or Google Inc.’s Gmail service.
Additionally, through its partnership with Rhapsody, Yahoo can further keep users glued to their search page. Effective now, searches for a band or song on Yahoo yield a Rhapsody window and branded player that allows relevant songs to be listened to in full. Like Rhapsody’s own MP3 store, however, this is limited to 25 free listens per month. Subscribers gain unlimited access to the service.
The makeover of Yahoo.com marks the company’s 14-year evolution from the Web’s pioneering directory of sites to an index of links to a search navigation tool to a complex media destination site.