Yahoo 2.0

Posted on July 7, 2008

It’s official today that MyYahoo is being rolled out to all users after more than a year in private beta. MyYahoo is by far the largest player of all start pages and there are a lot of them out there (iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, and Protopage just to get started). So with the reach Yahoo has, any changes made will affect millions of mainstream users (good or bad).

That’s always the danger with innovation (especially web-based, where hits and misses are amplified to the masses in a brief flash of time) that you do the wrong thing. Other side is you have to do something. Hey, this is Web 2.0. Though it may lose its gloss later on, it rules the roost right now. So you got to go with the flow or or be left stranded.

Anyway, today’s the day. And Yahoo says the best is yet to come. One of the big changes is that MyYahoo will open up to outside developer applications in the next few months. Pretty soon then, we’ll be seeing hundreds of widgets and gadgets pouring in and begging our attention.

No question that Yahoo had to address the subject of full scale personalization and data portability. So time will tell how well they do at it.

MyYahoo is over 2.5x larger than iGoogle and they don’t plan on losing ground. Of course Facebook is the topic of the day and it has grown to be as large as the iGoogle and MyYahoo numbers together. There is still some uncertainty about whether Facebook, as popular as it has gotten and as fast, will continue to thrive or begin to wither.