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Although both leading personalized user portals have been around for years, the two search turned portal turned Augustus Caesars have been upping the ante for your eyeballs.
The ongoing war is being fought with content and Web 2.0 as the delivery mechanism. Both My Yahoo! and iGoogle are personalized portals that allow the users to choose the type of content, layout, design, and tools that appear on the home page.
This spring iGoogle was redesigned and enhanced with new tools including Google gadgets (Google gadgets are interactive mini-applications like personalized, weather, etc. for your desktop – the same gadgets that inspired the gruesome Windows Vista gadgets).
The iGoogle gadgets include:
• Email - lets user view his or her Gmail messages
• Outlook search – lets user search Outlook messages
• Framed Photo - displays a series of photos
• GoogleGram - creation of special daily messages
• Daily Me - displays user's current mood and feelings
• YouTube Channel - displays videos from a YouTube channel
Google claims that iGoogle is its fastest growing product and some advertisers claim they get more traffic from iGoogle than My Yahoo!
Not to be undone, My Yahoo! unveiled a new look and features, this past weekend, to keep pace (or keep ahead of iGoogle). The move is hot on the heels of an aggressive review of the company this past summer by CEO Jerry Yang that promised to leave “no sacred cows.”
The changes are by no means radical, but are, for the most part, helpful (particularly to first-time or greener users) including:
• A search engine update with a “search assist” option
• Improved e-mail with unlimited storage and a text messaging feature
• AJAX powered drag and dropping of home page portlets
• An expanded stock ticker with trend icon arrows
• A new “Personal Assistant” with rollover icons for popular tools including mail, weather, news, sports, and horoscope (roll your mouse over the icon and the full details emerge)
Unfortunately, however, the home page is now busier and includes a big spatial advertisement in the right hand column. And while it may not be Yahoo’s problem per se, my browser crashed twice as I tried mousing over the latest NFL scores (this came with an IE warning about a “script error on the page causing IE to run slowly).
Having said that, I still like the Yahoo! interface more than the iGoogle interface. As well, Yahoo! continues to be the most visited website on the Internet with about 450 million registered users. In the portal arena, Google is still a follower, but a raging opponent.
The battle continues…
What do you think? Cast your vote for My Yahoo! or iGoogle by posting a comment below.
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Comments (1)
I don't like either one. I use Pageflakes (www.pageflakes.com) and enjoy not having to look at any ads.
Posted by Barbara Young | October 23, 2007 4:10 PM
Posted on October 23, 2007 16:10