Yahoo!’s Homepage Gets Social

Almost a year ago, Yahoo! announced its plans to redesign its homepage. The new homepage has gone through several changes, and is supposed to go live today. Users have the option of converting to the new page from a series of tabs on the left-hand side of the page. Once at the new page, users can access all kinds of third party sites. There is a great incorporation of social media right from the start. For instance, users now have a Yahoo! status bar that is supposed to answer ‘what are you doing?’ With tools like Facebook Connect, users will be able to stream this to their Facebook statuses.

Buttons linking to Facebook and MySpace are already provided for users on the left-hand navigation, with the option of adding more (Flickr was surprisingly missing from the initial group of buttons). The longer lists of buttons does include Flickr as well as Gmail and others. Users can also create their own buttons by entering the URL and name. Essentially, Yahoo!’s homepage can be used as an online bookmarker. How will this help Yahoo!? Even though the buttons lead users to a third party sites, Yahoo! will be using its ads to keep users engaged as well as to drive in revenue.