OS/2 e-Zine! - My Yahoo

My Yahoo - by Chris Wenham

Summary: My Yahoo is the oldest, the fastest and still the best. While it works hard to accommodate the mainstream crowd, it still supports OS/2 users well both with content and OS/2 friendly Java embellishments.

The first major Internet Portal, and the one all others seem to be copying, is My Yahoo. In recent years Yahoo has become practically a household name, even with those who don't own computers, as the company is not only chosen by the popular media as their poster child for the Internet age but also charms Wall Street with its recent profits. Yahoo has managed to funnel content and features into its portal well, presenting the widest range of services we've found so far.

Privacy And Setting Up An Account

My Yahoo conveniently puts the whole processes of specifying an account name, password, personal information and basic interests on one page. While it doesn't need to know your name and address, it does require you to specify your birthday, gender, occupation, the industry you work in and the zip code you live in. These are used by Yahoo not only to customize content for you, as they claim, but also for the purpose of targeting you with advertisements. For the privacy conscious, Yahoo's privacy policy, certified by TRUSTe, states that they do not share this information with anyone.

The sign up process also requires you to enter a password question and answer, such as "what is my pet dog's name?" and "Spot". Should you forget your password, My Yahoo will ask this question and display the password if you supply the correct answer. This is different from other web services which usually only ask for a reminder phrase ("Same password as my e-mail" for example.)

A pleasant bonus is that you only have to sign up once to get access to all of Yahoo's customizable features. E-mail, chat, message boards and everything else are automatically accessible with the same account name and password. And as you'd expect, your user name and password are stored in a cookie (which works only if you're using Netscape), so login is automatic whenever you visit My Yahoo or any of the other Yahoo services.

Services

My Yahoo is not a boring place to be. There's a lot going on (.GIF, 16K) that ranges from news headlines, Television listings, stock market prices, latest album releases (.GIF, 6K), health tips and more. In fact, we found it to be the leading service in content breadth.

Like most portals, My Yahoo has a place for you to add your favorite bookmarks. Yahoo's intention is for this to become a replacement for the bookmark feature of your web browser, the justification being that you can then access your bookmarks on whatever computer you can get access to. What's disappointing about this feature is that there's no organization features. It'll sort the bookmarks alphabetically, but you can't create categories to file bookmarks under like you can in Netscape.

The news feed is excellent and combines headlines from a variety of sources. Reuters, Associated Press, MSNBC and Ziff Davis are only a few of the news agencies to choose from and combine together. You can also select the topics that interest you, be it sports, music, film, business, technology or whatever. Yahoo does not link to other web sites for news, however. If it's displaying headlines from Ziff Davis, clicking on it will not take you to a Ziff Davis web site but to the article as it has been copied to Yahoo's site, complete with Yahoo's visual formatting.

The television listings are comprehensive and cover practically the entire United States, taking into account both local broadcast stations and those pulled in by your cable TV provider. As long as you tell Yahoo your time zone, cable provider or location, it can display correct listings for you.

Two useful features are the News Clipper (.GIF, 3K) and the Keyword Search. Both are forms of saved searches, meaning that if you have a set of keywords you search on frequently ("OS/2" or "Cats" or "Pink Floyd" for example), Yahoo can save these parameters and provide one-click access to them. With the News Clipper, keywords are used to scan the news archives for matching articles, published up to one week or three years into the past. Create a clipper for "Florida Fires" for example, and with one click on the front page you can get a list of all the most recent articles relating to the wildfires raging in Florida. This same concept works for the Keyword Searches, except that the search is performed on Yahoo's web site directory instead.

Customization

The content in My Yahoo is divided up into sections such as news, TV listings, bookmarks, stock prices and so-on. They're displayed in one of two columns, stacked on top of each other according to the order you prefer. Each of these is usually customizable by clicking on the "Edit" button found in the section's title.

Usually, when you customize something you're telling Yahoo what your interests are. If you want a sports scores channel or team calendar, you're telling Yahoo what sports teams you're interested in. Same goes for the stock price monitor, music releases

One of the disappointments with My Yahoo's customization is with the TV listings. Although you can customize it enough to display the right channels and schedule for your area, you can't customize the channel order or default time period. On the My Yahoo front page you get convenient listings for the top 5 networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and PBS) during prime-time (8pm to 11pm), but you can't customize this to show other channels and other time periods. If your favorite channels are CNN, TNT and Discovery and you prefer to watch TV from 5 to 8pm then you'll have to pull up a full listing and navigate to the 5-to-8pm time slot manually, each time you want to see what's on.

OS/2 Friendliness

My Yahoo was also the most OS/2 friendly of all the portals we tested. Yahoo not only has a good collection of OS/2 web sites in its directory, but it also has an OS/2 message board (.GIF, 6K) to discuss topics and get help in. Yahoo is also very platform neutral. Its real-time chat rooms use a Java client that runs well in Netscape for OS/2 and its pager (.GIF, 7K) or "buddy list" is also available in an OS/2 compatible Java version. What's convenient about Yahoo's pager, as opposed to AOL's comparable Instant Messenger or ICQ, is that the program is loaded, "installed" and run instantly from the web page, without needing you to unzip and install it yourself. All of your preferences and friends lists are kept on Yahoo's server.

But Yahoo does not carry a lot of OS/2 related news. WarpCast is not one of their news feeds, and if you set up the News Ticker to keep track of the keywords "OS/2" and "Warp", you probably won't find much at all. Neither does its computer-tip-of-the-day or product review section seem to cover anything related to Warp. Fortunately, both of these services talk about hardware 50% of the time, meaning they're not altogether useless.

Searching

Since Yahoo is already a well established web directory, that's what it defaults to whenever you use its search form. Yahoo does, however, have a partnership with AltaVista. Whenever a search fails to turn up anything on Yahoo, or you reach the end of Yahoo's results, you can jump straight into the results AltaVista has turned up on the same query.

E-Mail

Like Hotmail, Yahoo offers free, web managed e-mail accounts to anybody who wants one. While you can't access these e-mail accounts with a regular client such as PMMail or MR/2, the web interface is easy enough to get used to. It does mean, of course, that you'll be exposed to banner advertising at the same time.

Yahoo e-mail has all of the features you'd expect from a decent e-mail client, including folders, signature files and filters. Your My Yahoo page will also display a notice whenever new mail arrives in your account. This is of course a full blown e-mail account, meaning that you can send or receive mail from anyone on the Internet, not just other My Yahoo users.

Conclusions

My Yahoo won editor's choice for its sheer breadth of content, reasonable friendliness to OS/2 users and fast loading format. Like its parent web directory, this Portal is very light on graphics and resists using exotic HTML extensions.

The only disappointments we found were with the awkward scheme it has for arranging the layout of the custom page (it's limited to the default 2-column view) and the tendency for your custom page to grow several screenfulls long.

My Yahoo

by Yahoo
MSRP: Free

Chris Wenham is the Senior Editor for OS/2 e-Zine! - a promotion from Assistant Editor which means his parking spot will now be wide enough to hold his bicycle and a trailer.