The new-look Ajax-powered Yahoo.com homepage goes
live in the US on Monday and will roll out to other regions during the rest of July.
Read/WriteWeb exclusively profiled
the “preview” two months ago and now it is ready to be the default homepage for Yahoo’s
500 million users. The new homepage – which utilizes ‘Web 2.0’ functionality such as
Ajax, personalization and collaborative filtering – will display to US visitors from
Monday and all visitors of Yahoo.com internationally “in the coming weeks”.
Localized versions of the new homepage are available in Brazil, Canada, France,
Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Singapore,
Spain, Thailand, UK & Ireland, and Vietnam. Other locations will be added over the
coming weeks.
To celebrate, this month Yahoo! is running a homemade video competition. They
arranged for students from leading film schools to create video shorts, based on a series
of scripts about Yahoo! changing. Also anyone who wants to participate can create and
share their own videos – using (if they wish) the Yahoo! logo, yodel and script ideas.
People can submit their videos under a new Yahoo! Video category entitled ‘New Yahoo!
Campaign’. The best of these videos will be selected by Yahoo! to run in ads across its network.
In the press release, Yahoo is calling the new homepage “the most significant
re-design of its flagship destination since the site first launched in 1994”. Yahoo is
the world’s biggest Web property (a point they reminded us of
recently!), with 500 million users of Yahoo! branded Web properties worldwide.
I said when the
preview was released that this new homepage is a big step forward. Indeed I think it
marks a turning point in the whole ‘Web 2.0’ trend. If Netscape.com was a badly managed
transition of old-school portal to a Web 2.0 community news
site, then the transition of Yahoo from portal 1.0 to version 2 has been done with
caution, has not been rushed, and has introduced new functionality subtly. That’s the way it should be done – tweaks generally work better than wholesale changes. Kudos to Yahoo for creating a new ‘Web 2.0’ homepage and managing the transition for its large user base well.
