Woo hoo My Yahoo

I have a new favorite RSS reader again. Recently I have been using the latest Google Reader, which is still a fine RSS reader with a pretty good interface. But in the last week or so I rediscovered My Yahoo! again.

My Yahoo! has been around a long time. Long before the great RSS and feed stampede of the last couple of years. When My Yahoo first added RSS features, I tried them out but was unimpressed. You could display feed headlines or headlines plus summary paragraphs. One had too little information, the other too much.

Well last week I discovered their feed had a cool Ajaxy feature that displayed the summary information in a popup if you moused over a feed headline. This is great, cause you can browse the headlines, if something catches your attention, mouse over and drill down a little bit. If your interest is peaked, click on the link and jump to the site. Now this feature may have been their from the beginning for all I know, and I"m just noticing it now. But whatever, it's cool. This is exactly how an Ajax interface should work, give you the information you need, when you need it. So My Yahoo is back in the number one postion for reading feeds. Now if they would just add tabs for moving between pages they would really have something.

Boo Yahoo Mail

Well I wish the Yahoo mail team would take a look at the My Yahoo team's work. I tried using the Yahoo Mail Beta again last week, and had to bail out again back to the old RocketMail interface. They have fixed the speed issues quite a bit. The interface is much snappier. However, the main UI is still hosed. The interface still has the navigation bar on the left side. However, they still insist on putting an ad on the right side of the message pane. Thus, the message window is scrunched down in the middle of the page and uses a tiny font to display the message. Yuck. I want to read my mail using a normal sized font on a a normal sized page. If Yahoo does not get the UI right, I won't upgrade my mail account, I will just stop using it. Yahoo, you need to get the UI right, or risk losing a bunch of customers to Google Mail.