Finance Geek

Yahoo (YHOO) seems to be selectively rolling out its new homepage. We just popped open Yahoo.com and it redirected to m.www.yahoo.com. Besides an updated, cleaner layout, it also includes a customizable left navigation bar.

What does this mean? Instead of just customizing links to Yahoo sites, you can add links to external sites like MySpace, Wired, Barron’s, Forbes.com, NPR, etc. (But unlike Google’s iGoogle, it seems like you can’t just add any RSS feed or link. Perhaps an opportunity for improvement.)

The risk is that Yahoo’s massive homepage traffic firehose will start sending more eyeballs off-site instead of pushing them to along another Yahoo property. But the potential payoff is that if people enjoy the new homepage more than the old one — we can’t see why they wouldn’t — they’ll come back and use it more.

And it seems Yahoo could potentially charge companies for preferential placement in this “application gallery” if it wanted to.

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See Also:

• After Leaving Yahoo, Flickr Creators Team-Up For A New Startup (YHOO)
• Yahoo Finally Kills Web 1.0 Relic Geocities (YHOO)
• The Argument Against Yahoo-Microsoft (YHOO, MSFT)

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 6:39 am and is filed under Silicon Alley Insider. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.