My Yahoo/My Web

CNET editors' rating: 3.0 stars Good
Detailed editors' rating
Setup and interface: 6.0
Features: 6.0
Performance: 0.0
Service and support: 7.0
Overall score: 6.7 (3.0 stars)
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Product summary

CNET editors' review

• Reviewed by: Elsa Wenzel
• Reviewed on: 10/04/2006

If you'd like to be able to read news from hand-picked sources, as well as price airfares and look up driving directions all while checking your Yahoo e-mail within a single sign-in screen, the My Yahoo custom home page can do the trick. However, while this service is quick to set up, Google Home and Netvibes provide more gadgets and games, and they show more content in a tighter interface.

Just visit my.yahoo.com and sign in with a Yahoo ID to get started. To populate your sign-in page, Yahoo makes it easy to choose from among subjects such as Health and Fitness, Shopping, and Science, or to pick from its list of services and multimedia content. Top RSS feeds include the New York Times, the BBC, and quirky stuff, such as Awful Plastic Surgery. You can add News, Entertainment, Sports, and Money packages of content prepicked by Yahoo. To grab niche news, blogs, or Yahoo Groups updates on, say, knitting, just enter knitting in the Find Content field and click the Add badge. Netvibes, by contrast, requires that you know the XML or ATOM address of a site before adding its feed.

My Yahoo offers more colors and design themes than its rivals, though we found many themes garish. You can add a kitten, a holiday motif, a camouflage pattern, or another background to please your visual palate. My Yahoo's interface offers plenty of white space--maybe too much, and it tends to pile content far down the screen, forcing you to scroll more than with a compact, tabbed layout such as that of Google Home, Windows Live.com, and Netvibes. Both My Yahoo and Live.com suffer a banner ad atop the page.

Yahoo innovated early in the home page space by helping users to create a personal sign-in site chock full of feeds, without needing to know a lick about RSS (Really Simple Syndication). However, Google Home and Netvibes have surpassed My Yahoo in flexibility and user friendliness. My Yahoo's endless scrolling makes it clumsy to move modules to the bottom of the page. Also awkward, creating a page takes you to a new screen. You can't just add a tab and tuck content behind it, as Netvibes, Google Home, and Windows Live.com allow.

Rather than dragging and dropping stuff on your page from the start, à la Netvibes, you can control where items appear within your desired two- or three-column My Yahoo layout during setup. In our tests, however, the Change Layout page wouldn't let us move individual items between columns--very awkward. It was frustrating that we couldn't drag content between columns. On the other hand, this arrangement could be more intuitive for people who are less savvy to the dynamic dragging-and-dropping of Web 2.0 services such as Netvibes. On the bright side, Yahoo's text is larger, and you can just mouse over a headline for a little pop-up explainer.

My Yahoo offers more than just reading material for your page. You can add a notepad, a currency converter, Yahoo services such as Maps and Address Book, as well as podcasts and videos. But Yahoo currently lacks widgets (odd, given the many tools available at the Yahoo Gallery), so you can't add fun stuff, such as a game of Pac-Man, to your home page as you can with Google Home, Live.com, and Netvibes. Both Yahoo and Google make it easy to add cool new content, but Google's dynamic toys added to the fun and the utility. Yahoo's lack of gadgets can make for a relatively flat experience--but that may not matter if you don't yearn to play Pac-Man on your sign-in page.

Yahoo's online help resources are thorough and searchable. Plus, the My Yahoo user group can hook you up with peers. You can send Yahoo a question via a Web-based form, but only if you first mark one of its explanatory blurbs as unhelpful.

Yahoo loyalists may prefer to stick with My Yahoo. But we'd rather just use the more elegant Netvibes and add the Yahoo Mail module to it. Overall, My Yahoo is a good service. But we hope that eventually it will better incorporate the Web 2.0 dynamism seen in its other properties, such as Messenger with Voice and Yahoo News.

See more CNET content tagged:

Yahoo! Inc.,

home page,

Google Inc.,

gadget,

Microsoft Windows Live

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  "Yahoo 360 what is it"

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