Yahoo's Customized Portal Home

Posted on Monday, October 25th, 2004 1:56 PM

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I just finally got around to clicking the link on top of the Yahoo Home Page which swapped the old front page to the new one that was launched a few weeks ago. For some reason I had changed my My.Yahoo page, but not the portal home.

To my surprise and delight, Yahoo replaced the Finance icon to the left of the Yahoo logo with Yahoo Mobile instead. I was pretty amazed, but then I realized that's *only for me.* When I signed out, the Maps and Mobile icons changed back to Finance and Music. Pretty sneaky. I was pretty pumped there for a second - Yahoo seemed to be pushing their Mobile site to everyone on the internet! Too good to be true I guess.

The default link to the Music section, actually, reminds me of a fact we learned at Web 2.0: Yahoo's Launch is *killing* the other online music services. On a graph of unique visitors in the stats booklet they handed out (I wish there was an online copy), Listen.com, iTunes and Roxio were all well below the 5 million mark, MusicMatch (which Yahoo recently bought) was around 7.5m and Launch was at the top of a hockey stick line at 25m visitors and rising. Amazing. I had no idea that Launch was doing that well.

Now... imagine if Yahoo had the cojones to combine that music service with their mobile offerings?

-Russ

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