The New Yahoo!

Well, they've been hinting at it for a while. The new look is finally here.

Today's unlikely FamilyFirst site is the venerable Yahoo!

In my internet infancy, Yahoo! rocked. That's because they offered lots of content with little fluff and advertising.

Well, lots of weird scenes took place inside the gold mine after that (and if you don't get the Doors reference there, for Pete's sake, explore a little classic rock;-), and the next thing you know, Yahoo! Is being accused of becoming the bloated mess that the other search engines had allegedly become during the directory's heyday.

Well, they have responded to the criticism, NOT by becoming simpler, but by instead becoming MORE different.

Is it better? Is it worse? I guess the next few days will make that clear.

Personally speaking, I like it and I don't. I think that they definitely outdo msn.com portal-wise, but I would have liked to have seen a return to the drop-dead simplistic glory circa 1996. Yahoo! Was the cool surfer's front page in those days, and its stature showed in healthy IPO rates.

So here's to mega-corporations taking chances. There are probably a few youngsters out there who don't remember “New Coke.” That apparent marketing blunder actually cemented Coke in place as the dominant seller. Perhaps something similar will happen as the result of the new look of Yahoo!.

http://www.yahoo.com/

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