Yahoo is the original Internet location. Back in the early days everyone had their Hotmail email address, and had Yahoo search directory set as their start page in Netscape Navigator. Things have changed drastically since then. Google is in the spotlight for search, and Yahoo has branched out to offer some important services for todays internet users, (insert Mozilla fan boy comment now) and we should all be using Firefox.
Taking a queue from Richard MacManus' post on the Top 10 Yahoo! Properties, we would like to highlight some of Yahoo's services that are making a difference in our lives in this Web 2.0 landscape.
A few years ago trying to browse the web on a PDA or mobile phone was an exercise in futility. Not only was rendering web pages too much work for slow mobile processors, but many mobile devices had anemic screen resolutions of 160 x 160 pixels.
These days a mobile phone has far more processing power than my first computer, and many devices have QVGA or even VGA screens. But mobile browsing is still a very different experience from sitting at your computer and entering URLs with a keyboard and mouse. That's why mobile start pages can be so important.
Sure, you could enter URLs one character at a time, or bookmark every web site you might ever want to visit again. But you can also set as your homepage one site that has links to thousands of pages that are designed specifically for the small screen. This method also has the advantage of letting you access the same content no matter what device or web browser you're using. Here are a few of our favorite mobile start pages.
Netvibes has announced a few colorful updates to their online service. The Coriander release brings with it improvements from numerous suggestions.
First off, Netvibes Coriander gets an improved RSS experience. Even though we really didn't think the old version was bad, Netvibes now has the ability to use multimedia content from blogs and news feeds without ever leaving the page. Listen to podcasts, view videos, and play games right on the start page.
Sharing customized Netvibes content is now pretty simple to do. Click on the arrow in your content feed window and choose whether you want to share the feed, module or widget via email, IM, or even drop it on a blog or website with some HTML code.
Maps now have a new search module in the Coriander release. Craigslist was brought on board in the first round of changes, and now there is a Map Comparison Search module that can be added to pages.
The final addition to the mix is the new personalization feature. Users can add a subtle touch to the Netvibes interface by changing colors of the module windows.
There are many great AJAX start pages out there like Google, Netvibes, Pageflakes and yourminis , but none of them have what Webwag has going on. Stemming from site feedback, Webwag has developed Widget on Demand, a new tool that allows users to easily create and design widgets from any web page. Users were hard up to find a way that they could easily view content from sites that did not provide RSS feeds for their news service, so Webwag stepped up to the plate. The WOD tool is easy to use: just click "Add new content" from under the Webwag logo, type in your destination URL, select the area that you want your widget to display, and there you go. It does tend to cut content off, and can really only be used for areas that constantly update and change text in the one area you have selected to display. It's extremely simple to make a widget, and very useful if you utilize start pages and want to add content for sites that do not provide RSS feeds.
Yahoo is the original Internet location. Back in the early days everyone had their Hotmail email address, and had Yahoo search directory set as their start page in Netscape Navigator. Things have changed drastically since then. Google is in the spotlight for search, and Yahoo has branched out to offer some important services for todays internet users, (insert Mozilla fan boy comment now) and we should all be using Firefox. 
A few years ago trying to browse the web on a PDA or mobile phone was an exercise in futility. Not only was rendering web pages too much work for slow mobile processors, but many mobile devices had anemic screen resolutions of 160 x 160 pixels. 
