Yahoo's Web 2.0 Overhaul

New features on the famous website's front page emphasize user-contributed content and sophisticated interactivity.

On the Internet, 20 months is an eternity -- yet that's how long Yahoo stuck with the most recent design of its front page. In fact, it was enough time for the emergence of an entirely new way of using the Internet, loosely called "Web 2.0" and focused on user-contributed content, media tagging and sharing, social networking, and browser-based services, rather than desktop software.

A close-up view of Yahoo's interactive Personal Assistant, a new feature on its overhauled front page, which uses pop-up windows to let users monitor their personal media and services without leaving the page. (Courtesy of Yahoo.)

Catching the Web 2.0 train before it leaves the station is what the just-released redesign of Yahoo's front page is meant to do. Starting today, visitors to www.yahoo.com/preview* will see a radically different layout, which emphasizes an interactive "Personal Assistant" and links to the most popular content from Yahoo's large network of sites and services, such as Yahoo Music and the Flickr photo-sharing service.

The redesign is one of most drastic in Yahoo's 12-year history, and it's the most visible step yet toward the company's recently expressed goal of transforming Yahoo from a search portal into a locus for personalized information and community-generated content, ratings, and reviews.

For a year or more, a common buzzword uttered by Yahoo engineers and executives has been "social media" -- the idea that one-to-many communication on the Web has given way to many-to-many communication, and that traffic and conversation naturally cluster around content, such as videos, photos, blog posts, and bookmarks. Examples of social media in action at Yahoo include My Web 2.0, where users can save, share, and tag Web pages they've visited; Yahoo 360, a free blogging and social networking service; and Flickr, which first popularized the concept of "tagging," or adding informal labels to content such as photos to facilitate searches later.

Now its front-page redesign puts social media right up front at Yahoo for the first time. It also indicates how the company may go about restructuring its offerings around the knowledge and media that average users upload to the Internet by the gigabyte every day, as well as the collective "wisdom" they demonstrate through their viewing and shopping behavior.

"What you'll see on the new front page comes from listening to our users about what they do [on the Web]," says Ash Patel, Yahoo's chief product officer. "It helps people connect with the content and the people that matter to them, either through search or e-mail or community-generated content."

Web 2.0 makes its most prominent appearance on the new front page in the form of Yahoo Pulse, a space for popular listings and user-contributed media drawn from other Yahoo properties. A lucky photographer who uploads her photo of last night's glorious San Francisco sunset to Flickr, for example, might wake up the next morning to find that millions of Yahoo users have been served a thumbnail image linking directly to the photo.

* Correction, May 18, 2006: An earlier version of this story stated that beginning Wednesday, all visitors to Yahoo would see the new front page. In fact, it is still necessary to visit Yahoo's "preview" page at www.yahoo.com/preview to see the new design; once someone has visited that page, it becomes the default Yahoo front page on their computer. Yahoo says that the new page will become the default front page for all visitors over the "coming months."