My Yahoo/My Web review

You can look up nearly any topic to find related news, blogs, and Yahoo Groups to add to your My Yahoo page. Unfortunately, moving items around the page is harder to do.

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.