My Yahoo dropped the beta label and went public officially on Monday. The new version integrates many new interactive features to the web portal.
My Yahoo is many an Yahoo fan's home page. The site integrates closely with other Yahoo products such as news, Flickr and email and is valued for its density and breadth of information from user-customizable sources around the web. The beta version of the new My Yahoo page has been in testing for more than a year.
The new and improved customizable home page now features the ability to change background theme and color, add content and change layout via drag and drop formatting.
Available content includes several news sources, social networking site content (such as Facebook) and easy access to your Yahoo mail account. Changing the layout includes up to five columns of information and design themes like Bubblewrap, Camouflage or Fake Fur.
The site is close in feature parity to iGoogle, but adds a little Yahoo flavor. For example, the background themes support colors, textures and old My Yahoo themes. In contrast, iGoogle's tends to take on the spartan but cartoonish qualities of its own site and is limited to only three columns.
ReadWriteWeb reports the introduction of application partitions and Ajax technology suggest greater efforts by Yahoo to pave the way toward being the container of OpenSocial JavaScript Gadgets (or widgets, or applications, or what have you).
OpenSocial is an open API for utilizing the social data of participating "containers," or social websites. In this example, third-party OpenSocial applications could utilize Yahoo friend data automatically after installation. The technology is driven by the OpenSocial Foundation, founded by Google, and include such partners as Friendster, hi5, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com and Six Apart.
The My Yahoo release serves as a kind of heads up: Come July 14th, the new My Yahoo is all you're going to get as the company retires the old version.
[via ReadWriteWeb and My Yahoo Blog]
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