Well, Yahoo! has developed a new Web 2.0 beta version of its “My Yahoo!” interface. So far, I’m not impressed. Here are some gripes I have about the “upgrade”:
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The small header at the top of the page is gone. There used to be a very small header in the top right corner that told you whether or not you had any new mail (and how many messages were new, if you did have any). It also included links to Yahoo! and “Everything Yahoo!” (a list of all of the services Yahoo! offers).
- I can’t search the TV listings from my My Yahoo! page anymore
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I have no choices when viewing my “Yahoo! mail” preview. In the old My Yahoo!, there were links to your inbox, to compose a new message and to update the list of my new messages (which would essentially reload the My Yahoo! page). Now, I can’t do any of that. I only get the choice to go directly to one of the messages on my list or to go to the main page of my Yahoo! mail
- The advertisements are extremely obtrusive. At least in the old version, they were at the top of the page in the standard banner format. Now, the advertisements are in very large boxes in the middle of my page.
However, there are also some nice new “Web 2.0” features. Some of those are as follows:
- My mail preview updates itself automatically.
- If I mouse over a message subject, I get a summary of the message content in a little “tooltip” type of window.
- Some space on my page is conserved by adding “pages” to some of the widgets. For instance, in the sports widget, “Today” and “Yesterday” on separate layers and you can switch back and forth between them. In the old version, they were just one big long list all together.
- It’s much easier to collapse and expand all of the various widgets.
One Response
I hate the new My Yahoo! Sorry to say that. I’m sure a lot of work has gone into it. Some of my gripes: Print colors and difficult to read. For instance, I use the white background and can barely see the blue headlines for my news feeds. Another one: The format choices supposedly allow you a thick center column with two more narrow side columns. But they’re all actually the same size, not allowing a larger news view in the middle. Terrible. Yet another one: Scoreboard has too many bugs. I keep entering my teams and don’t get the scores. Finally, many of the cool themes from the old My Yahoo are gone. Why? Going back to my first comment, at least I could read the print. I am very disappointed with this beta. Bob Riley