Yahoo, the often-forgotten web behemoth, has been hammered by bad news, bad decisions, and shrinking market share. Last year Microsoft tried to acquire Yahoo for a hefty premium, but co-founder and then-CEO Jerry Yang did everything he could to kill the deal. The result? Yahoo tanked, Jerry Yang was ousted, and Carol Bartz was hired to bring Yahoo back to prominence.
One of the biggest pieces of the Yahoo reinvention has been the much fabled Yahoo redesign. We weren’t expecting it for a few months, but in a call earlier today, we were handed the details (and the screenshots). Oh, the kicker: Yahoo’s new homepage launches tomorrow. Can Yahoo’s new design save it from demise?
Yahoo: Now With More Purple
Yahoo was founded not as a search engine, but as a portal to the entire web. However, the web has drastically changed – tools like Facebook, Last.fm, and Twitter have been part of a wave of more powerful and social web applications that the Yahoo homepage simply does not encompass.
The new homepage is designed to make Yahoo the web’s #1 destination portal by, once again, giving people one place to access everything. This time around, they’re not doing just news, groups, and email, but integrating with Facebook, MySpace, and mobile phones so that Yahoo is always the starting point of your web journey. Take a look at the screenshots below:
The interface is less cramped (although it still packs a lot of stuff), search is emphasized, and My Favorites replaces the old Yahoo Services bar. The key is personalization: if you’re a huge reader of The New York Times or a big Flickr user, you can add or create widgets that help you connect to these sites on-the-fly. You can even update your Facebook status from the homepage, although Twitter updates aren’t anywhere to be found (you probably could just make a widget for that though).
Yahoo is relying on customization and social media integration to become the web’s portal once again. If you want to access it, Yahoo.com/TryNew will take you to the new Yahoo homepage, where you can permanently switch. It will not switch over for all users at the same time.
But will it bring Yahoo back?
Is the new Yahoo homepage an improvement? Absolutely: it’s cleaner, offers more personalization, pushes up the search bar, and is simply nicer on the eyes. But that’s not the question we should be asking. Instead, we should ask this: Will Yahoo’s new homepage help it rise back to prominence?
Our answer: almost certainly not. While these new features and widgets are wonderful changes, they’re not new innovations – it’s borrowing concepts from iGoogle and its own My Yahoo start page tool.
Yahoo believes that users are looking for one place to find everything they need. We don’t believe that’s the case. Users in the social media age are looking for engagement, to discover new ideas and new content, and to accomplish tasks with greater efficiency. While you can browse parts of Facebook from Yahoo.com, you’re still going to visit Facebook itself. While you can build a Twitter app on Yahoo, it’s not going to be as good as Tweetdeck or Seesmic. And while Yahoo has great content, it doesn’t have rich media like Hulu, YouTube, or Wordpress.
Yahoo’s new website is nice, but it isn’t a home run. And when both Microsoft and Google are breathing down your neck, you need to hit one out of the park in order to survive. Despite the new face, it’s still Yahoo, and it will have the same difficult problems that it had yesterday.
Reviews: Facebook, Flickr, Google, Hulu, Last.fm, MySpace, Seesmic, TweetDeck, Twitter, WordPress, YouTube
Tags: Yahoo
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