The RSS experiment: My Yahoo!
It's week #4 in The Great RSS Experiment, and this week on the chopping block is the personalized home-page tool, My Yahoo. My Yahoo has been around for years, and in the interest of fairness, I have to admit that I've used it for much of that time. I originally thought this would be an easy week with a tool I'm already comfortable with, an illusion that was quickly and painfully shattered.Unfortunately, while My Yahoo is a solid personalized home-page, it appears that even a relatively small number of RSS feeds (about 12-15, in my case) are enough to choke the system. More details below in my ratings breakdown:
Usability: 1/4 
My Yahoo is fairly well supported by most of the feed tools, making adding RSS feeds simple enough. Unfortunately, as soon as I added the majority of my feeds, the system started to die. Roughly half the times I tried to visit my home-page, Yahoo returned an error that my data couldn't be retrieved and spit out a generic (and useless) page. Much of the rest of the time, feeds that I knew were recently updated showed no entries in the past 3 days. I've actually had the latter problem on and off with My Yahoo, but it seemed like the more modules I added, the worse the situation became. In the end, My Yahoo became almost unusable. Even when it did work, the formatting took up quite a bit of space, requiring a lot of scrolling to view even my dozen feeds.
Features: 2/4 
As a personalized home-page to check up on movie listings, weather, etc. (and maybe a couple of feeds), My Yahoo has a decent feature set. Even without the technical difficulties, though, it really is only adequate as a feed reader. You can display a set number of recent feeds (which you can specify), but there are no features for tracking what you have and haven't read. This is, admittedly, similar to the core functionality of Google Homepage, but since Google integrates Google Reader, I have to give My Yahoo lower overall marks on features.
My Yahoo! Recap
I should point out that most of my experiments were on the existing version of My Yahoo, not the new version currently in beta. I tested the new version briefly: it didn't seem to recognize my feed additions, and was loaded with additional content and clutter. Oddly, while some things were more customizable, a few options seem to be gone from the new version. Since the updates are only in testing now, I thought it would be fairer to review the existing version.
That said, the existing version not only won't become my new RSS reader, it probably killed My Yahoo as a personalized home-page for me. This is quite an accomplishment, since I've liked and used My Yahoo for years. Long story short, if you are at all a serious RSS users (i.e. you read more than half-a-dozen feeds), there are many better options. Up next week: Bloglines.
Peter
· Saturday, April 21Interesting review. Though Yahoo! had a much more solid homepage because of its popularity. I coincidently saw a clip on a Dutch blog where Yahoo! developers claim that because they have been around so long there products are superior to Google in its usability.
http://www.usarchy.com/2007/04/yahoo-google-usability/
(Blog is dutch, video is english)
Dr. Pete
· Saturday, April 21Thanks, Peter; I saw that somewhere recently as well. As soon as you start bragging about your usability, odds are that you're missing the point. I think a lot of people use My Yahoo for the same reasons I did; it was among the first, and there was a time when Yahoo was way ahead of the curve. If they think they're still in 1st place, though, they need to get out of the office more.
Dr. Pete
· Saturday, April 21I've got a few weeks left, Jimbo: currently on deck are Bloglines, NetVibes, PageFlakes, coComment, and possibly Yahoo Pipes. It seems like new ones are popping up all the time.
jimbow8
· Friday, April 20Hmm. I'll have to check back in to see your recommendations. I use My Yahoo! as my homepage. I don't mind it but have occassionally had problems adding certain things.