Yahoo Resurrects The Personalized Homepage With “My Yahoo” Revamp

Yahoo’s rollout of new products and redesigns continues today, with the release of an updated My Yahoo homepage featuring the same, more modern look-and-feel which accompanies all its online and mobile properties as a part of the company’s “Grand Slam” makeover project. In other news: yes, My Yahoo apparently still exists.

The idea of using personalized homepages to kick off your day’s web surfing is a holdover from another era – before tabbed browsing and always-on Internet connections became commonplace, and before tools to get quick hits of information, like Twitter or mobile apps, supplanted the need for portals filled with widgetized bits of data. The personalized homepage is decidedly a Web 2.0 product, and no amount of fresh paint can really change that.

That being said, there’s always a core group of users attached to these products. When Google decided that its personalized homepage iGoogle was no longer worth the investment last year, hundreds of commenters responded with outrage. They claimed that using a homepage is easier than having multiple tabs open, thank you very much, and they had used the service daily. And they shook their tiny, virtual fists at Google for abandoning them.

Well, maybe now those users will consider Yahoo’s homepage, given that it’s no longer the ugly, dated-looking product you may remember from days past (see below). There’s even a way for My Yahoo to import your iGoogle settings.

So take that, Google, with your self-driving cars and cures for death, My Yahoo is back and stealing hundreds of your users!

Really Old My Yahoo:

The newly revamped portal lets you tailor your page with widgets that access your email accounts, calendars, stock portfolio, sports scoreboard, weather, Flickr, other Yahoo content, and content from around the web.

The pages ship with theme packs including Oscar de la Renta (CEO Marissa Mayer’s fav), Rachel Zoe, Jenni Kayne, artists Chihuly, Polly Apfelbaum and Alec Monopoly, and bands like Empire of the Sun, Twenty One Pilots, and FUN. Oh, branding fun!

Yahoo, in what’s now becoming an infuriating behavior, is showing off what the new page looks like via an animated GIF on its official blog this morning. But here’s a less seizure-inducing shot.

New My Yahoo:

* Oh, did I use the wrong Yahoo logo here on this post? Sorry, I thought this one would be a better fit for today’s news.