I have been using My Yahoo and Yahoo mail since 1997. Every time I think I want to go somewhere else for mail or a different home page, the folks at Yahoo make a nice and welcome change. Recently they have revamped the functionality in both the mail and the My Yahoo page. The mail beta has been out for some time now so I am going to focus my comments on the My Yahoo page changes. Both the mail and My Yahoo pages are in beta so your mileage may vary.
Appearance
Switching over to the new beta was easy and relatively painless. I was pleasantly surprised that my old theme, Stars & Stripes, was not too garish. Although the theme was fun, I decided to change the color by personalizing the page. I tried beige initially but the lack of contrast made it harder on my eyes so I settled on blue. Note: I do not know how to switch back to my old theme.
Some of the things I noticed:
- I prefer the new layout when I use a wide browser window.
- If you add it to a new module to the page and the fonts look fuzzy you need to refresh your screen.
- Switching between pages(e.g. Finance page) is pretty slow. I think this is due to the advertisement.
Modules
The next thing I needed to clean up was the modules. Some of the modules are not supported. Since most of the modules that did not appear were not too important to me, I deleted them.
I added a few new modules. The mail preview is a module I have used in the past and found it almost useless. It kind of works. It has Web 2.0ish preview that is useless for most of my email. I suppose I could use it to delete email if that function was available but I think I will keep a separate window open to my mail. I get way too much low priority mail for this small interface to do me much good.
The Market Summary is a module I have not used in the past. It’s nice although I do not know why I need to know the market summary.
The TV Listings interface benefits from the improvements to the interface. Scrolling to the next hour was quick. I like the new Weather module.
Movie Showtimes and Evite are two modules in appear to be in development. I wonder what the folks are going to do with del.icio.us and Flickr.