The New Face of Yahoo.com (Flickr) Yahoo.com is slowly rolling out a redesigned front door with a slimmed-down set of features and a customizable set of links to both Yahoo and third-party web services.
Aside from the obvious cosmetic changes, there are some stand-out new features: The list of links running down the left side of the screen is customizable, much like a widget dashboard or an Ajax start page. Signed in Yahoo users can check their Yahoo mail, Gmail and AOL Mail inboxes from the Yahoo home page. They can also see recent account activity for their favorite web services like Flickr, eBay and local event listings.
It's a welcome change -- I always found the old Yahoo frontdoor to be too cluttered with icons I never, ever would have clicked on, like financial news, a shopping portal and real estate or Yellow Pages listings. Now I can get rid of them. I also applaud the openness of allowing me to add and use outside web services on Yahoo.
Soon, developers will get a chance to submit their own apps for inclusion in the left rail through the recently-announced Yahoo Application Platform.
There are also changes to the news stories displayed on the home page. Stories from Yahoo Buzz are given greater prominence, and, as reported on Epicenter last week, the news stories themselves have undergone some design changes.
The new home page is only being exposed to a small percentage of randomly-chosen users (Yahoo says over 80 million people visit its home page each day). The first switches were thrown on Wednesday night, with more users and more features due to be added over time, according to the company's official blog.
That screen grab above is also from Yahoo's blog. None of the Webmonkeys are seeing the new home page yet, so we haven't tried it out or had the chance to grab an original screenshot. Have you seen it? If so, what are your impressions?
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