My Yahoo! Gets a Facelift

One of the first portals on the Internet got a face lift today.

My Yahoo! began offering its users the chance to upgrade to their new version. Once you click the link, all of your current pages and modules carry over to the new version. The conversion process seems very robust – it handled all of my modules seamlessly.

The most significant new feature, in my opinion, is the tight integration of RSS and Atom feeds. Rather than being a single module, each feed gets its own module – an idea I mentioned back in March:

I’m a little disappointed that they didn’t adopt Netscape’s old model of one module = one site, but this is really a step ahead of the competition.

There are a few lasting problems with My Yahoo!, mainly interface-related. For example, I haven’t been able to figure out if it’s possible to move modules between pages or to re-order pages. I also wish you could put the same module with different settings on more than one page; this doesn’t work for things like the Yahoo! Photos module. Finally, now that there’s millions of new My Yahoo! channels, it’s hard to find the ones Yahoo! provides – things like comics and weather, which you can’t generate using RSS.

All in all, it’s a nice upgrade, but they still have more work to do.

Jeremy Zawodny, a Yahoo! employee, has more at his blog.