Holy Crap!
During one of today's cab rides, a Yahoo! Taiwan engineer was telling me about the re-launch yesterday of Yahoo! China's home page. He said it was search focused and uncluttered.
I decided to have a look for myself and was even more surprised than I expected to be (does that even make sense?). They have several tabs, just like Yahoo! US and Google do. But get this...
They have a MP3 as a full-blown tab!
Wow.
And it even lets you search by all the common formats too: mp3, wma, etc.
I'm not sure why this impresses me so much. AltaVista has had an MP3/Audio tab for quite some time. Maybe it's the terminology that gets me? Having "MP3" front and center feels like a throwback to the Napster days or something.
Posted by jzawodn at November 10, 2005 12:01 AM
And now I'm playing "guess what jeremy is reading from the favicons" - so far I've got Gmail, Russel Beattie, and what I think is 43 folders. The ones with the four squares is really annoying me though - I'm sure I know what it is!
:-) It should be done 2 years ago. Anyway, not too late....
The mp3 tab, i think, is following baidu.com's example.
Speaking of Yahoo's global properties, any chance that Yahoo US will get an image search/browser as slick as Yahoo Korea's?
http://kr.image.yahoo.com/
What's cool is that -- looking at your screenshot, and antrix's Korea/Images link -- is that there is so much flexibility to experiment with different approaches.
Google does this much less with their sites (see http://www.google.com.cn ), opting for the "consistent look-and-feel" side of the argument.
From an American point of view the mp3 tag really does look retro. This redesign is obviously to make Yahoo appeal to Chinese web users that now use Baidu.com. It's kind of creepy how similar they look right down to the prominent mp3 tab.
