Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog

Back in Oct 2008 Yahoo was testing a new homepage. This version of the homepage has not become live yet and probably won’t given the fact that Yahoo has now a new CEO, Carol Bratz, that has a very clear vision for the company. A vision that is also reflected in the new version of the homepage I just got (probably as part of a small percentage test Yahoo is running) – big focus on search, display advertising and a better portal to generate more page views on the Yahoo network.

Couple of observations:

• The header height was shaved by a few pixels, the Yahoo logo was moved right next to the search box instead of above it, and almost all of the essential information is viewable above the fold! pretty impressive that Yahoo was able to achieve that without getting eliminating links and content that is on the current homepage

• The expandable tabs that are used in the left side bar (called Favorites) make the home page extremely extensible with all sorts of information and applications, from Yahoo properties (Finance, Messenger, Flickr, movies) and partners (eBay, NPR, BBC, and more). It is also great for advertising since there is a medium rectangle ad (most desirable ad size on the market) on every tab. This should increase the number of home page ad impressions sagnificantly. Anyone wanys to model what it will do to the stock price?

• Yahoo clearly wants you to do more searches and that’s why they moved the “popular searches” box to the top and made it so prominent

• Yahoo also wants to regain their position as a portal to the Yahoo network. That’s why they:

(a) placed the link “View Yahoo! Sites” which expands to a directory of all the Yahoo sites at the top of the Favorites left bar

(b) moved the articles section to the top and increased its size from 5 to 10 links

• One very interesting application that was pre-installed for me on the favorites bar was MySpace. I wonder if that is a first sign for a deal that might happen between MySpace/FIM and Yahoo (the Google deal is supposed to end in mid 2010) or is that just a traffic aquisition campaign mySpace is running on Yahoo

Overall, I like the new design. It is lighter, cleaner and the information is organized in a more logical and accessible way compared to the existing homepage. Who knows, if this version will eventually become the live one, I might switch my homepage back to Yahoo like in the good old days.

Update: According to Sillicon Alley Insider, this new homepage is not a test but a phased rollout.

Here are some photos of the new design

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Big buzz today around the revamped Flickr mobile site (see TC, RWW, Mashable), their “universal access point for all device types.”, but a simple test that I did on my iPhone shows that the folks at Sunnyvale have missed one important and frustrating issue that mobile users experience daily when accessing Flickr urls.

This is not the first time I write about the fact that a direct link to an image does not load in its mobile version. The solution is so simple, that I am amazed no one at Flickr caught this while building the new version. All they have to do is detect the UserAgent and in the case it is of a mobile browser, change “www.flickr.com” to “m.flickr.com”. A simple manual test proves it is working.

So from now and until it gets fixed by the Flickr folks, you can use this manual hack and edit the url in safari’s address bar whenever you get a link (via email or twitter) to a Flickr image.

flickr-on-iphone-manual-hack

Happy Thanksgiving, originally uploaded by twinsline7.

I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving filled with good food, family and friends!

BTW, in order to have a photo in this post, I did a quick search on both Flickr and Google’s Picasaweb for the term “Happy Thanksgiving”, and noticed how different the two services are: Flickr is all about creative & artistic photos of food, decor, nature, etc., while Picasa is all about family and friends. Something to keep in mind when trying to explain the impressive growth of Picasa in the past 12 months.

Do you know these house organizer services you hire to come to your house and organize stuff? Well, one of the best things that often happen when they organize your house & closets are the forgotten photos and other items they are able to find.  Things that you know are somewhere in the house but you have no clue where exactly.

Well, Xoopit is the same but for your Gmail (as long as you use Firefox). It is a great inbox search utility that makes it easy to find attachments (photos, videos) and browse through them inside Gmail.

You should give it a try.

According to Flickr Camera Finder, the iPhone is the most popular cameraphone users use to post photos to their Flickr accounts. Not that a surprise given the iPhone’s popularity and how easy it is to upload photos direct to a flickr account via email or one of the native iPhone application.

So, if Flickr is so popular among iPhone users, how come Flickr has not optimized their site for the iPhone? It is really annoying to recieve direct links to Flickr images (I get those mainly via Twitter) and see that they resolve to non-optimized pages.

In case Flickr is looking for inspiration, they should take a look at Picasa’s optimized interface for the iPhone. One thing I wish Picasa would take from Flickr is the ability to upload via email. Picasa could only benefit from this feature and see a spike in photo uploads, just like Flickr saw.

Since June ’07, a MyBlogLog user can add services to his profile. These are the user’s online identities on over 30 popular social services (Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, del.icio.us and others). This is very useful and creates a richer profile.

But viewing someone’s profile and figuring out which username belongs to which service is a frustrating process that involves trial and error. Labels (text or favicons) would greatly help here.

Make labels for data fields distinctive, so that they will not be readily confused with data entries, labeled control options, guidance messages, or other displayed material.” (Jakob Nielsen, Sixty Guidelines)