The big story today seems to be the roll out of Yahoo’s new homepage. While this is very cool for Yahoo to do I still think that there are some problems with the idea.

1. Is This What People Really Want?

I’ve recently read Getting Real and while I do not agree with all of the book it presents a very good point to this issue. Yahoo’s homepage is now a cacophony of options. Compare that with Google and see that at google.com you only have one option. It’s simple you search. At yahoo.com you have millions of things to do all distracting from the search function, which I feel is of primary importance.

2. US only? (to start)

So this new amazing service is only available to US people to start. Really? With such an interconnected world we have you are only offering the new features to US accounts. It’s not like we are talking about phone numbers (Google Voice) that might really mean restricted access imposed by government organizations. We are talking about an intentional choice to limit the access to the ‘preferred’ customers.

While they don’t say it by only offering this service to US people they are setting them up as special thus alienating the rest of the world for the time being. I realize that they are doing a staged roll out of the service but I say offer it to the beta testers around the world then let it go for all users not a select few in a particular geographical region.

The Proposed Plan

I say don’t add more features to yahoo.com, take some out. Have a separate page to aggregate your ‘lifestream’ fine but do not make me see all the options when I simply want to search something. Being better than the competition is not doing it bigger and better it’s just doing it better. Kill the cruft.

Second do not setup a preferred client based on purely arbitrary reasons like a border. We are not talking about services regulated by governments (for most of the world) so just open it up to everyone. Alienating potential clients just is not good business.