For all you techies that think Yahoo! is dead, think again. With over 130,000,00+ visitors a month, Yahoo! is still an attractive suitor, whether the valley believes it or not. Yahoo! is now using this as their selling point for developers to start making plug-ins for their new (and supposedly improved) homepage.
Using the proprietary Yahoo! Application platform (YAP) developers can easily create slightly more advanced widgets that users can “install” on their homepage. Currently there are 80+ apps that you can install on the Yahoo! homepage ranging from the standard weather apps to social media sites like Myspace and Facebook. In another words, there is sure to be an app you will enjoy on your homepage.
While this is a worthy attempt to make Yahoo! your destination site of choice I still have a feeling that Yahoo! isn’t quite doing enough to differentiate itself. Many personalized homepages do what Yahoo! does and I believe in iGoogle’s case, much better. Some of the apps also seem slightly buggy. When using the Wordpress Quickpost application it was not uncommon for me to run into some issues trying to load the application in its own window (otherwise known as canvas view, much like iGoogle’s own implementation).
Also, while Yahoo! sports 80+ applications the last time I checked iGoogle had nearly 2,000+ widgets available for its users. Yahoo! definitely has very little developer support on its side an dobviously page views are not enough to make developers change their mind about moving to Yahoo! Part of this probably due to the fact that Yahoo! is not introducing much of anything new to the table of widgets and customizable homepages.
With Yahoo’s new focus on it’s customizable homepage they better learn quick that developers are not going to start developing for them unless there is a compelling reason to move, and so for there simply isn’t. Yahoo! needs to start differentiating itself to compete for the glorious default homepage and Google is definitely still winning that war.
Via YDN
