Yahoo makes good on promises

Yahoo is making good on its promises to overhaul their site into a better, more accessible version of what it is now.  It’s looking to make the main page into something of a cross-breed between the MyYahoo page and the current main page.  It will essentially try to act as even more of a hub of your web browsing, with the ability to add bookmarks and web services like Gmail to the sidebar.  You apparently won’t even need to leave Yahoo to view the content of some of these pages, though it isn’t outlined how that’s possible.  Yahoo will also implement a system they call “Content Optimization Knowledge Engine” (hopefully COKE for short) that will be able to recommend sites to users based on past web activity.

A small number of users will be randomly selected to try this new service before it is rolled out, presumably in a sort of beta test.  It will be interesting to see how those people react.  A lot of services like this new Yahoo offer the ability for users to add their own “applications” to the framework.  So far, Yahoo has no plans for such a feature.  This might matter to those people who use Yahoo as their major stop when they first start browsing, but to others it probably won’t matter. 

Personally, I only use Yahoo for news on rare occasions, and an old email account that gets mainly spam.  iGoogle is my main page, and it works perfectly for what I use it for.  I never spend more than 15 seconds or so on my main page, and I prefer it that way.  Yahoo’s new page will be useful for those who aren’t very internet-savvy, like the grandmother who uses a computer only to play casino games and check email.  I doubt it will be anything revolutionary to those of us who are on the web a lot, chances are we already have something that does the same thing.