My Yahoo! was a
start page
A home page (or homepage) is the main web page of a website. Usually, the home page is located at the root of the website's domain or subdomain. For example, if the domain is example.com, the home page is likely located at the URL www.exampl ...
or
web portal
A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displayin ...
that combined personalized
Yahoo!
Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...
features, content feeds, and information. The site was launched in 1996 and was one of the company's most popular creations. It was discontinued in December 2024 amid words of protest among users.
Applications of My Yahoo
My Yahoo’s purpose was to have users personalize their pages.
The appearance, layout, and content of the main Yahoo homepage was standard, but My Yahoo offered customization. On it, users could apply themes, add sites, add widgets, rearrange the layout, and add tabs to the page.
A My Yahoo page allowed access to almost everything needed on one page. For example, applications and programs that allowed access to social networking, Lottery numbers, a mail aggregator, a
news aggregator
In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, content aggregator, feed reader, news reader, or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates digital Content (media), content such as online newsp ...
, gaming applications, etc... The goal was to give people access to everything they were interested in on a single page.
Users were able to link to
Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo! Answers was a community-driven question-and-answer (Q&A) website or knowledge market owned by Yahoo! where users would ask questions and answer those submitted by others, and upvote them to increase their visibility. Questions were orga ...
.
Provided the option to link
Yahoo Local
Yahoo! Maps was a free online mapping portal provided by Yahoo! Functionality included local weather powered by The Weather Channel, printing maps, and local reviews powered by Yelp. It shut down on June 30, 2015. For a time in 2019, Yahoo! Maps ...
. Enabled local search capabilities.
In 2011, they created a
mobile app
A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a smartphone, phone, tablet computer, tablet, or smartwatch, watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop appli ...
.
In 2024, Yahoo! announced that My Yahoo! will be shut down and will be replaced with a new service without RSS feeds. The shutdown appears to have taken effect as of December 11, 2024.
RSS features
*Yahoo's personalized pages are less specialized than less popular sites. It is more stable
*It is also one of the fastest RSS readers.
*52% of My Yahoo users are aware of RSS tools and 39% use RSS tools.
*Many websites had an “Add to My Yahoo” button to make adding an RSS feed to My Yahoo simpler.
Criticism
My Yahoo couldn't consolidate different feeds resulting in the need for multiple streams.
Since the September 2013 redesign, users had complained of numerous issues:
#Font size was too large and couldn't be changed
#Applications were less configurable
#Weather app used auto-locate instead of remembering a specified place
#Column resizing was no longer allowed
#Forced inclusion of a large Yahoo search bar
On 24 August 2017, many users reported that all
RSS
RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many ...
feeds stopped working.
See also
*
iGoogle
iGoogle (formerly Google Personalized Homepage) was a customizable Ajax-based start page or personal web portal launched by Google in May 2005. It was discontinued on November 1, 2013,Google SupportiGoogle's Decommission/ref> because the compa ...
*
My Excite
*
My Lycos
*
MSN
MSN is a web portal and related collection of Internet services and apps provided by Microsoft. The main webpage provides news, weather, sports, finance and other content curated from hundreds of different sources that Microsoft has partnere ...
References
External links
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{{Aggregators
Yahoo!
News aggregators
Web portals