14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo showcased its new mobile home page a few weeks ago at CTIA Wireless 2009 trade show in Las Vegas, allowing the world to make an idea of how the company intended to personalize the Internet for users on both mobile phones and personal computers.
What the new mobile page brings around is an aggregation of services onto one page, including news, weather, emails, RSS feeds and status updates from several social network sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. According to Yahoo, this approach is meant to eliminate the “App Fatigue,” which would result from users having to cycle through a series of applications in order to be able to read emails, check calendar, see news or update social networking statuses.
At the same time, the new aggregated homepage Yahoo presented at CTIA is rather different from what Google has, as the latter is focused on creating very high-quality standalone products, like maps, gmail, and others.
Adam Taggart, Yahoo’s senior director of product marketing for Yahoo Mobile, stated recently that the dashboard idea was “big for Yahoo in general,” reports mocoNews. In addition, he also stated that the mobile web was only one step the company had made, and that a similar service would soon come to PC users as well. “Our identity has been confused, but we want the portal to be the starting point for the internet,” he said.
According to Taggart, aggregation is soon to become vital due to the fact that “people are constantly managing more information and more accounts.” At the same time, he also says that the problem becomes compounded on mobile. “We believe there is ‘app fatigue.’ You may download 10 to 30 applications, but then only use two.”
The launch of the aggregated homepage does not exclude the development of standalone apps, says the company. In fact, a Yahoo Messenger application for the iPhone has been recently launched, and the company is also working on some other apps for Yahoo Mobile, while the iPhone OS is only one of the platforms they will work with. The most important thing here is to make the homepage work very easily in a web browser.
The new Yahoo page offers users an enhanced mobile experience, as they can enjoy a oneSearch search bar at the top of it, along with links to Yahoo Mail (or other email addresses they use), and there are also notifications from Facebook or Twitter accounts. A wide range of customizations are available as well, allowing users to add weather, RSS feeds, stock symbols, or even topics.