YAHOO BETA
Ahhhhhhhh. Done with the Vegas beast. Now I can write lightweight columns contain ill-formed thoughts based on personal whimsy… mmmmMmmMMm.. weblogging.
Yahoo is showing off it’s new BETA site. The obvious question is, "Welcome to the new millennium, Yahoo… what the hell took so long?" While I have no insider knowledge at Yahoo, I’ve discerned that this requirement was partially due to the David Filo (Co-founder and Chief Yahoo!) insistence that the front page stay lean. This makes good system engineering sense as faster load times equate to less expense, but Yahoo took it to the extreme. In almost a decade of existence, there has been no major user interface change to the front page of the site.
This reeks of engineering owning part of the process/product that they should not. Sure, the front page needs to load obscenely fast, but there are a great many ways to significantly improve a web-based user interface without sacrificing performance. Take a look at the evolution of any number of popular sites and you’ll see a massive amount of changes over the years - you’re not going to tell me these guys are throwing money out the window loading graphics. Or maybe you are.
Sure, Yahoo has done reasonably well with the lean and mean user interface, but the new user interface demonstrates that someone with a clue decided to tackle the difficult task of equating usability with profitability.
Semi-unrelated point. Delighted to see the "most popular" link right next to the search button. More validation that groups of people sift the web so much better than any bot. So much more to say here.
Other sources of hot pipin’ fresh buzz:
http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/
http://www.daypop.com/top/
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/mt/?u
