Allen Weiner

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Allen Weiner
Research VP
7 years at Gartner
23 years IT industry

Allen Weiner is a research vice president for Gartner's Media IAS service. Mr. Weiner has more than 25 years of experience as an analyst, writer, editor, publisher and broadcaster. He has written about media trends in daily newspapers and magazines as well as serving as a chief analyst and… Read Full Bio

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Yahoo’s New Homepage: Show Me the Wow

by Allen Weiner  |  July 22, 2009  |  Comments Off

During Yahoo’s second quarter earnings call, CEO Carol Bartz talked of her company’s many current and planned projects aimed at providing operational stability, the tools to hit the ground running when the economy recovers and offering the market a sense of “wow” related to Yahoo’s products and services. Bartz pointed to the newly unveiled homepage as an example of wow with many more such innovations to follow.

I fail to see the wow. The primary change on the home page is a customizable rail/column that allows the consumer to add his or her favorite pages/sites/social networks to provide a one-stop panoramic snapshot of everything that’s important in one’s world. The truth is, customization works best if those sites you want to add are either Yahoo properties or those (such as All Things Digital) who have formatted their content for customizable viewing. The “apps,” as they are called, are in three flavors: Yahoo sites, partner sites (or perhaps those who have worked to make their content suited for preview) and your favorites. A box allows individuals to add their favorites to the front page, but adding my blog and Twitter resulted in a major fail as these personalized add-ons failed to load previews. Adding Facebook, which looks to be pre-programmed, kept giving me a message to log in, but even after logging in, it didn’t work. Makes me wonder if others are having the same issue.

Beyond the customizable issues, why can’t the search box at the top of the page be customized so I can focus on the categories I search most: videos, blogs, news. I’d like to move image search off the main window and add one of my own preferences. And what’s with that little box at the top next to my name that asks for my status? Who sees that, and how do I see others in my network? And, lastly, if Bartz says that video is important to Yahoo, why isn’t there a single video window on the new homepage?

There’s wow and then there’s WOW. In the case of Yahoo’s new homepage, I think it falls short of both.

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Category: Search Twitter Web 2.0 Yahoo blogging social media     Tags: , , ,