Yahoo! Rolls Out New Homepage

It seems the fact that everyone is talking about Microsoft and Bing made Yahoo! a little uneasy. The company today rolled out Yahoo! Front Doors, a customizable homepage for users.

The basic idea is that you fill your homepage with stuff you want. The biggest change is that the site now offers direct links to tons of sites like Facebook, Twitter and eBay. These can then be added to "My Favorites," the panel that appears on the left hand side of the homepage which up until now, only linked to Yahoo! services.

Hovering over any of these links will bring up the desired application. In other words, you don't have to leave the Yahoo! homepage to update your Facebook status and anything interesting you find while browsing can be easily and quickly shared, again without leaving.

"We're pulling together everything about the user they care about, be it on Yahoo or off, to create a personally relevant experience," said Tapan Bhat, senior vice president for consumer experiences at Yahoo!, according to CNet. "In a world like this, Yahoo needs to make the user experience come first."

The company is also looking to use the change to improve on advertising. "We're creating great opportunities for advertisers to target content and context," CNet cites Bhat as saying while demonstrating a movie app that showed advertisements alongside movie showtimes.

I'll admit that it took me a while to notice the changes, simply because I hadn't been to Yahoo.com in so long. That said, once I'd found my bearings, I actually sort of liked it. Any Yahoo! users in the house and embracing change? Let us know!

Check out the full story here.