It its simplest sense, Yahoo! is blending the broadcast, editorially controlled view that Yahoo.com has long offered with the personalised, self selected view of information that the company's My Yahoo! service has offered - mixing things that users know they want with the serendipitous or unexpected. These changes will be tested on small number of users initially before leading to a full scale overhaul later. Two years ago, the last redesign of Yahoo.com took up to six months to implement.
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.
The new home page relies on slick personalisation technology that allows users who have signed into their account to see when new information arrives not only on Yahoo! sites, like e-mail or news, but off-Yahoo! sites such as eBay auctions or Google's Gmail service. Instead of whisking people to these sites, users can see a preview of the information while staying on the home page, allowing them to quickly navigate across a range of their favourite sites. The Yahoo! home page attracts around 100 million US users a month and 300 million worldwide.
Yahoo! is moving carefully with this personalised approach in the knowledge that less than 15 percent of its user base subscribe to its existing My Yahoo! personalisation service. Speaking to Reuters, Caroline Dangson, an analyst with market research firm IDC, commented, "It is a leaner look, it is more user friendly."
However Dangson also said the collective judgement of IDC researchers is that Yahoo! has made a series of very exciting announcements over the past year but has been slow to deliver on any of its promises to open up and transform how its sites function.
"These are announcements. But when does this really roll out?" Dangson asked of the new home page design.
And while Yahoo! moves carefully so as not to anger its base of hundreds of millions of visitors, many of its biggest rivals have made sweeping changes in their own sites, Dangson said. These include Microsoft Corp's MSN, Time Warner Inc's AOL, Facebook and News Corp's MySpace, everyone it seems, except Google. Some of those makeovers have frustrated users who prefer "classic" versions of their favourite sites, Dangson said, adding to the caution of Yahoo!, which attracts some of the biggest audiences on the Web to Yahoo!.com, Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Mail.
Caroline Dangson added that the real test of the success or failure for the Yahoo! home page redesign will only come when the company opens up Yahoo.com to let independent developers create their own applications for the page. At the moment, the biggest question on our lips is how soon we are to see these changes in action.
