MyYahoo! launched its upgrade today (apparently early). Michael Arrington has a nice overview of the features and changes. In generally I like it quite a bit. As with Answers, Yahoo! is adding social features (sharing and one-click adoption), which is very smart and necessary to keep pace with the competition. Netvibes and Pageflakes have similar capabilities.
If you’re a registered Yahoo! user, Local is baked in. There was a Local/Maps module in my beta upgrade.
As Arrington points out, the site now more closely resembles the Yahoo! home page (left nav in particular). Unfortunately, there’s a big tile ad in the upper right. Netvibes’ Tariq Krim steadfastly refuses to have this sort of display advertising on his site.
I have long believed that notwithstanding its reported 50 million users MyYahoo! is a strategic asset that Yahoo! has allowed to languish. Unlike any other site (save Google), it has the capacity to truly mainstream newsreaders/RSS. And this upgrade should prevent some defections to competitors that might have happened had Yahoo! failed to make these changes.
But the real opportunity is not simply to hold ground and prevent “defections” but to truly mainstream RSS and personalization. Netvibes has 10 million users according to the company, but those are admittedly “early adopters.” And Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen and I yesterday discussed what it might take to mainstream personal start pages.
To that end, the new “packaged pages” on MyYahoo! go some distance in this direction by making it easy (like sharing) for people to customize and add content without too much effort.
I think there’s a very interesting opportunity here, which is partly about community and sharing and party about marketing and messaging.
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Read/Write Web features a response to the new MyYahoo! from Pageflakes’ Dan Cohen (who managed MyYahoo! and worked on GoogleIG). TechCrunch has a post showing traffic figures (per comScore) for these pages.
