Imitation and the Slippery Slope of Portaldom: My Google

Heh, the first thing I tried was to see if http://my.google.com/ worked. Nope, not YET.

I really do believe Marissa when she says that this "product" is not aimed at My Yahoo. No one in their right mind would try to compete against a mature product like My Yahoo with only 5(!) news sources. This looks like another 20% project to me that will make it out of beta sometime around 2008 - but it will use AJAX! Hey CNet - did you hear that? It's got a fancy interface! You'll need to cover this from at least 10 angles before your readers forget there are other products out there that have done this way better for a long time already.

But hey, a million monkeys at a million keyboards will eventually write AdWords (or copy it from someone else), so keep plugging away, Google. Perhaps the next 20% project could could be an automated Google Cohesive Product Strategy Generator. I haven't seen one so far.

I love how you linked the Marissa (BETA) site. That site is hilarious!

If you ask from that point of view: It sure does look nicer than my MyYahoo page. And it was the first page where I found drag'ndrop of boxes working.

Besides that both My Yahoo and that Google thing as a 'My page' have not much value for me, at the moment. But as the wast majority of users seems to want such stuff, they are probably doomed to go there.

And is it really imitation? It is not as Yahoo has made something so unique and special, nobody else ever would have thought of. If you feel flattered because of that, you are easy to impress.

Playing with it for three minutes I can say, I like it. I can imagine myself using this personalized page with rss feeds very soon - especially when they have a look and feel I enjoy. MyYahoo on the other hand is quite ugly and used for one purpose only of me - easy access to the lottery numbers once I do play that game.

But I am sure to see some changes soon, now that there is someone better ;)

Jeremy, Cool, I'm laughing out loud!
Nicole, I don't agree that myYahoo is ugly any more. After it got flickrized it is much more better now, I'm happy to see that Yahoo is working smoothly and constantly on improving without hurrying up for a BOOM.

Google still has a long way to go to beat My Yahoo!!

It looks like my trackbacks still don't work. My initial response to My Google is that this feels a lot more like Dashboard on Mac OS X than My Yahoo. Each section is like a Dashboard Widget. Perhaps we should call them gidgets (Google Widgets).

It is only a first impression, but I prefer the look and UI of My Google instead of My Yahoo. I reserve the right to change my mind though.

Ug, the link to my post about this didn't show up in the comment, you can find it here:

http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/archives/2005/05/19/my-google/

So, it finally happened ...

Google Portal still lacks a calendar, which you and I both lamented.

Watch Google take a swipe at Amazon next with "Google Store" -- heh.

^^ Well, that sure was weird. My identifying information in the previous comment disappeared. *boggle*

Must be the sun spots.

I say in the 2008 US Elections, we bump the Green party in favor of the Google party. Just think: Republican, Democrat, Google.

I must say, Yahoo looks like a throwback to the 90's compared to Google.

I'm not sure why this is such a shock to you since google news has been brewing for so long. Normally more competition is considered good for consumers, but I can see why both Yahoo and even MSN would be a bit uneasy about Google taking aim at more and more what they do. I mostly use Google but my view of Yahoo has changed in a positive direction over the last few years due to what seems to be a newer culture / attitude.

Personally, I think that the general look and feel of their google's beta site sucks. It's a little too plain for my taste but I wouldn't say Yahoo is the most graphicly pleasing site that I've even seen either. To each their own.

There are very few things left on the web that's original but it is nice to see what they did with other products such as gmail which I didn't hear anyone complaining about yahoo's mail and the effect on it. I'll be more interested to see how Yahoo further innovates from here on.

I created a My Yahoo page way back when it first launched (can't even remember the year now, was it 99 or 2000?) and I used it as my browser start page every day to read news mostly.

And it was so goddamn ugly and painful to modify (I might as well have been using PageMaker to lay out HTML). Things have not changed that much in 5 years, My Yahoo is still painful to set up and customize. Though I can bet that you guys are going to jazz it up and make it much more user friendly in a hurry now ... innit? Why must every Yahoo product wait for Google to launch an equivalent before they decide to make it user-friendly? Drag-and-drop layout was possible in 1998, why must My Yahoo make you navigate endless pages with forms? Why can't you fix that instead of getting worked up about RSS feeds that make sense to a fraction of a percent of the population ...

Yahoo Mail's interface STILL sucks ass even a year after Gmail launched, and how long has that been around since the invention of DHTML? What has happened to the Oddpost people?

PS: Please don't screw Flickr. They have such a beautiful interface.

Forgot to add: I am a heavy user of Yahoo Groups
(from the time that they were at Egroups.com in
1998-99) and the user interface was somewhat bearable though kind of painful for high-traffic lists. With the recent UI changes, it's just plain unusable. I can't believe how awkward the navigation has become. Nowadays, I just forward everything to Gmail and read it there so that I don't go insane ... please tell the Yahoo Groups folks to consider offering the "classic" UI as an option.

Eh. Nothing new here. I mean you copy them too. search.yahoo.com might as well be called google.yahoo.com. Let's give Tapan Bhat six months to take My Yahoo to the next level and circle back to this later.

lol...a rip simply a rip...
Google makes me think about My way...Like "yeh we're gonna make a Yahoo portal but without ads and better services"...and just like My way they simply can't do it... Bill Daughterty who already failed with Excite , also failed with My Way... And now Google ...pathetic

Appearantly I am one of the only ones who likes the new group layout better than the old one?

With Y360 and the Groups page, it is even more displeasing to the eye to look at the MyYahoo page, and I am not even talking about the new stuff and complete new layout and functionality, but a nicer, less 199x color template.

Let me put it that way: If Yahoo comes out with nicer layout and interfaces for MyYahoo soon, I will try not to blog about it as 'The guys at google must be very flattered because Yahoo finally followed and copied' but try to say it is 'they followed their own services like Y360'.

Oh and noone complaining about Yahoo Mail? No wonder. No one is using it. At least no normal person, who has a voice in the blogosphere. No one as in the usual suspects - they just use mail clients or have other webbased clients like Gmail.

To be more precise - the new interface. I am stuck in some places with the basic interface of Gmail - ugly! Unusable. But with the nice interface - great work.

So, looking forward to the upcoming changes. :)

I don't know why, but I just thought you would've named the image on the top as "your-google.png" instead of "my-google.png" ;/

This shouldn't come from Yahoo! side purely because they're reading you. Being a longtime loyal Yahoo! user, I would say Yahoo! is more than a copycat.

I agree with you Jeremy, I posted my ideas about My Google in my blog

Wow. So Google listens to customers. Why are people so happy that they are peeing their pants? It would be outright moronic if Google passed on an idea just because somebody else came first.

So the really amazing thing to me is, that even a yahoo-employee seems to make a big deal out of the fact, that "here, finally, one thing that google is copying from us!"

Yeah, this is so long in coming and obvious. I hate to say I told you so... I know you've seen it coming too, Jeremy.... been reading you for a long time.

I dont see a big deal here. All you guys copy from each other. Then you make up new names for it. :)

Spoken like a true cynic, Barry... ;)

Alright, that been said let's go back to My Yahoo!
http://carboneyes.free.fr/blogpics/yagoo.JPG

I could not agree more with LongTimeYahooUser.

For many years Yahoo was my search engine because MyYahoo was my home page.

But today, with Bloglines, Google News and Gmail, I have no need for MyYahoo's clunky interface.

It really is a shame because MyYahoo is still the best integrated source of all the news I want: sports scores, weather, RSS, national & int'l news, etc. But the horrific user interface is an app killer, which precludes MyYahoo from ever being a killer app.

In this world it is not who's first, but who's best...

Josh: I bet Microsoft says that a lot too.

Good Lord. Just how self-righteous can you get? Like Barry said above, you guys rip off things from each other all the time, not to mention other sites.

What's your latest property? 360ster? My360Space? Talk about flattery...

Some say that this new Google page is the beginning of portaldom.

I disagree because of the opt-in nature of this new feature.

Type "google.com" and you get the original clean search page.

Type "yahoo.com" and you get Jenifer Lopez, Yoda, a Dell flash ad, Kendra from the Apprentice, a club sandwich, a weather report with two sun icons, an ad for free credit scores, news headlines, entertainment headlines, a list of yahoo services, the yahoo web directory keywords...

do you see the difference?

I really wish someone at Yahoo! would look at their base page with fresh eyes.

I haven't gone there for months and I NEVER use it to simply search for something.

So, before you start crowing about Google copying you, how about working on a less annoying mess of a home page. Then get yahoo.photos to reliably appear on my myYahoo page. And allow me to BAN animated flash ads at the top of the page. And allow me to sync myCalendar to iCal.

I use many Yahoo! services and I really like them, but you guys really have got too much work to do in the UI department to throw stones at Google.

Just my 2 cents.

Make Yahoo maps (the product Yahoo sat on and did nothing with for years) as powerful as Google maps and then Yahoo people will have something to talk about. For now, the only ! in Yahoo's name comes from the ranting of employees as they watch their rears getting kicked by the Googonauts. RSS in a portal... funny: my web browsers been doing that for months.

Innovate.. then advocate. You've got it the wrong way around.

But let's face it, you're all following Excite and Netscape. More on this at:

http://www.tnl.net/blog/entry/Google_Personal_Page_and_History

A shame if Google becomes Poortle, but also good, because Yahoo! needs competition to become all that it can.

Yahoo! seems to have been stepping it up lately, and it is great to see. Ya-hooooo...

ALSO great to see is this UFO that touched down in the Oxnard area. UFO, plane, or just WHAT is that triangular thing (with shadows?) http://maps.google.com/maps?q=STEALTH,+california&ll=34.114802,-119.107643&spn=0.004560,0.007714&t=k&hl=en

Its not plane for me to see.

willc2, you dont see on Google what you see on Yahoo simply because Yahoo has way more content to display whereas Google has...well nothing...

Don't complain about calendar synchronization on Yahoo calendar, Google users are lucky enough to get a HTML editor one year after Gmail has launched...

As for the Yahoo Photos I noticed it actually has a conflict with Yahoo Briefcase, If I disable the Briefcase the photos actually works.

Tristan Louis:
This archived Excite page is far behind My Yahoo or that google page...I cant see a comparaison

Why the whole "MY" thing? Actually, Google doesn't have to make it be my.google.com. They could just do the personalization on google.com if the user is signed in. It would be a much better approach in my mind. Don't make users think with new URIs then spend a bunch of dollars on marketing them.

The best thing that Google ever did was to have a clean homepage... unless, it what I (the user) wants it to be.

My Google! is drag-n-drop for item arrangment.

...and it still loads faster (a LOT faster) than Yahoo.

Please (if you haven't seen this site already), please--look at this at least once in your life:

whowilldietoday.blogspot.com

Damn... aren't WE snarky this morning!

BTW... the above comment was meant as a joke... (WRT snarky) forgot to put a :) after it :)

But Guillaume, I think willc2 is right. Having, as he said, "Jennifer Lopez, Yoda, a Dell flash ad, Kendra from the Apprentice, a club sandwich, a weather report with two sun icons, an ad for free credit scores, news headlines, entertainment headlines, a list of yahoo services, the yahoo web directory keywords..." on a page isn't really helping me or (I'll bet) many, many others. I don't want all of that cruft - it interrupts my reading experience and distracts me in ways I find unhelpful. I don't mind distractions, so long as they are useful or part of the reading context or something I've asked for.

I'd just prefer that Google keep things streamlined. It's one of the reasons why millions of us moved from Yahoo! to Google for search in the first place. This is great, much better than it could've been, and worlds better than my.yahoo.com's current clutter.

And, I dunno people, I *like* the drag-n-drop thing. Don't care if others have done it. It's really easy to use. I like that G just cares about making something that I can show my mom and she just gets it, you know? (Saves me trouble.)

Google simply is a Yahoo-wannabe...and it will inevitably have ads...
And you can't compare this google site to Yahoo.com, you compare it with My Yahoo...apart from the top banner on free accounts (as far as I remember I'm on Yahoo Plus) that you can block thru FF...I dont remember seeing any other ads...

"Mayer confirmed that the company intends to eventually add advertisements to the page, but not for a several months."

source:
http://news.com.com/Google+introduces+personalized+home+pages/2100-1032_3-5714284.html

Guillaume:
This archived Excite page is far behind My Yahoo or that google page...I cant see a comparaison

Actually, the reason I linked to the later Excite one was that they were the first to put it on the front page (at the www.excite.com instead of a separate my.foo url). Back in the days, however, they were the first to introduce a personal page (with many people saying that this was going to give them a major edge over Yahoo! Of course, history tells us those people were wrong :) ) but credit where credit is due :)

If all y'all want a clean, lightweight, ad-free search UI from Yahoo!, then http://search.yahoo.com is the URL for you. I use it all the time. Between search, my, and mail, I hardly ever go to the home page.

I think the biggest issue I have with this "My Google" release is that it looks a lot like some half-baked 20% project that totally goes against the published corporate philosophy (2/10) “It's best to do one thing [search] really, really well.” This is not search.

To read more of my opinion, check out this blog entry:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-0ZFmUbk1erC6prHGUJbW_UclZ3O1Sw--?p=67

Ok, Guillaume, that's fair but it looks like the Google Page compares better in terms of cruft to my.yahoo.com as well. The first thing and most important item on my customized page? An ad for Linda Georgia, your original Psychic Friend (shudder). Man, that's tacky. I really don't want that.

And I can pull up Movies, Weather, Gmail, Google News and the NYT so they all show together *and* they don't look cluttered.

And there's a lot less page that has to be devoted to controls like the popup thing that sez "Move to Top, Move Up, Move Down, Move to Bottom". Why can't I just, y'know, move tha thing? :)

And I guess you can point to a Google person saying 'yeah we won't rule out ads' but what else are they gonna say? For me...there's no ads right now and that's what counts. If they put 'em on, I'll move to something else.

But it *is* better right now for me. But I have faith in Yahoo! as well, I'm sure they'll respond with something wicked cool, too.

But see should the page look cluttered or not it's up to you...You can customize you My Yahoo page with a white background if you want and simply put some black title to your module...I would find it weaird if you got something cluttered o_O In fact you can do whatever you want as far as appearance is concerned...wonder if Google will do that as well...

Having been a sometimes-avid reader of your blog for nearly a year, let me just come right out and say this: You are at your best when you are talking about the cool things your company should do, or criticizing it for the things it has not yet done and should. You are at your absolute worst when you attempt to ridicule or make fun of your competition, who has of late been beating you pretty resoundingly in the marketplace.

It's also awfully hard for you to take the moral high ground when I can think of a half dozen Yahoo properties in the past year which have attempted to emulate the look, feel, and features of similar Google offerings.

I think My Yahoo does a lot that this Google portal (or personalized page, whatever) doesn't yet, but I also didn't feel like Google was simply copying your interface. There's stuff on Google's page that you don't that's cool and neat, and the interface is also a lot less cluttered and 1999. It's fine to take credit for being right about the fact that some users are after a single web page that aggregates a lot of information, but reading you attempting to jeer at a competitor just comes across as excessively whiny.

Do what you do best: Talk about cool new ideas, and the ways Yahoo can exploit them.

Having been a sometimes-avid reader of your blog for nearly a year, let me just come right out and say this: You are at your best when you are talking about the cool things your company should do, or criticizing it for the things it has not yet done and should. You are at your absolute worst when you attempt to ridicule or make fun of your competition, who has of late been beating you pretty resoundingly in the marketplace.

It's also awfully hard for you to take the moral high ground when I can think of a half dozen Yahoo properties in the past year which have attempted to emulate the look, feel, and features of similar Google offerings.

I think My Yahoo does a lot that this Google portal (or personalized page, whatever) doesn't yet, but I also didn't feel like Google was simply copying your interface. There's stuff on Google's page that you don't that's cool and neat, and the interface is also a lot less cluttered and 1999. It's fine to take credit for being right about the fact that some users are after a single web page that aggregates a lot of information, but reading you attempting to jeer at a competitor just comes across as excessively whiny.

Do what you do best: Talk about cool new ideas, and the ways Yahoo can exploit them.

The difference between My Google and My Yahoo is that I'll be using My Google without even thinking about it. With My Yahoo however it's a different story.

Shocking that "Google" will be using a Google product without even thinking about it. Really. What's next? Microsoft using only Microsoft created tools on it's Intranet? What's that? They already do? Wow, I didn't see that coming.

I cant understen you, you work for Yahoo! and have an email account con gmail, use firefox and the SE selected is google, use adwords from google and have a lot of links in your mozlla from google?

Are you working for Yahoo o for Google?

jajaja
See who talks..

Yahoo has imitated google since ever..

jajaja
See who talks..

Yahoo has imitated google since ever...

Oh my god!!!!
Try the NEW-SUPER-NICE-AWESOME Yahoo! My Web Beta!!

http://myweb.search.yahoo.com/myresults/default?.done

"Find it, Save it, Never forget it.
Never lose a web page again"

"There's a radical idea! Turn on My Search History to quickly access past searches and visited results. Innovative! Whoever thought of the product is a world-class genius! What next, an Local Search? 1GB email account? Image Search?

Hi, Jeremy,
We've also found that the whole "my" thing works pretty well even on Yahoo Groups such as My Linkedin Power Forum!
Indeed, we reached 1,000 new Linkedin users so rapidly that even WE, our tiny little Forum, generated fierce competition in just 3 months!
:-)
So the "my" thing works and apparently imitation still is the sincerest form of flattery!
I invite you to stop by and introduce yourself and this post to My Linkedin Power Forum:
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/MyLinkedinPowerForum/
Vincent Wright
Creator/Moderator,
My Linkedin Power Forum
5.26.2005

I like the new personlization page, not so much for the news or words of the day, feature which don't really excite at any "My" page but for the intergration of My Search History, Gmail, and groups, once they add RSS and let me add my own sources, it should be perfect. Can't wait until they get an IM client, I hope they will support ISight.

Guillaume, thanks for the briefcase tip. Now I just have to enter my yahoo password every few days to photos to appear on my.yahoo.

I sure as heck WILL complain about calendar synchronization. I use iCal and Entourage on 2 other computers and I want my damn calendar synced. I would go to yahoo more often if one of their features worked right.

As for yahoo's content that they have to display; It's irrelevant clutter to me. I know they have to pay the bills with advertising, but they're not advertising stuff that I want.

FREE IDEA: take my yahoo.finance stock picks and advertise products from those companies.

My Yahoo is INCREDIBLY ugly compared to Google. I have circled all the ugly elements in this picture.'

http://img199.echo.cx/my.php?image=ugly3bi.jpg

Hard to believe that Marissa Meyer is actually the author of that blog. Perhaps it is actually Mark Jen?

"Welcome to the content game, Google.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and some of us are quite flattered."

Could I let you in on how TIRED most people are with this smarmy, annoying:

"Insert annoying comment on its own line."

BULL? Most of the time, it's something so bitchy and dipshitty that my grandmother wouldn't say it.

Grow some chest hair and stop being a girl.

Jeremy swiping at Google for immitation? Give me a break! That's coming from the site that has taken UI duplication to a new level.

Yahoo = Google - 6 months

Sincerest form of flattery? Did you guys ever notice how the Yahoo search page is a complete ripoff of Google's? And really, who cares if they get into stuff Yahoo is doing? They always raise the bar. Take email. Yahoo email sucks. When gmail launched yahoo offered, what, 4megabytes of space?

I certainly don't think Google is original, but they're amazing at raising the bar in whatever they do.

Google is your all-in-one web. You can even share your documents and let people edit it. Cool huh? :)