Product Pulse – December 1, 2006

Posted December 1st, 2006 at 2:16 pm by Julie Han, Blog Team

 15 Comments / Filed in: Product Pulse

Break out the mistletoe and bring on the eggnog! December is here and we’re kicking it off with some fresh new looks and features worth checking out.

• Dressing to impress: Yahoo! TV has gotten an updated look and feel. Whether it’s a preview of the new McDreamy episode or the latest gossip from Survivor’s last castaway, find everything you ever wanted to know about any show on Yahoo! TV — spoilers, user reviews, photos, and more. Read more here.
• The gift of mobility: Why not box up a mobile Internet experience for your loved ones or yourself this season? The Nokia 6300, 5300 XpressMusic, or 520 phones now directly connect to Yahoo! Mail and Messenger, enabling you to check and send messages, look up your to-do list, and pull up important contact info while stuck at the airport or running errands. More Nokia Series 40 phones with this capability to come.
• Look ma, no login!: Flickr just introduced a guest pass to help friends and family avoid the rigmarole of having to create a Flickr account just to see your private photos. They’ve also resuscitated their mobile site and introduced a new “camera finder” feature that lets you see what sort of photos the latest models of SLRs, point-and-shoots and camera phones are taking. Read more here.
• Be inspi(red): In honor of World AIDS Day, we’ve created a special site to raise awareness and offer ways to show your support, such as links to “red” products that will donate profits to the cause, a virtual T-shirt for avatars, and video clips about the work of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Even our front page is shouting its support with a cool red ribbon that weaves through our logo and ends up wrapped around the globe.
• Blimey, squidgy, cheerio?: Finding out the latest on foreign affairs and worldly issues just became a quick find — with a British accent, I might add. Yahoo! News now showcases a variety of up-to-the-minute BBC video clips with breakings news and top stories on business, politics, technology, health and entertainment.

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15 Comments Add your own

Rowland Reed | December 2nd, 2006 at 1:36 pm

I really, really don’t like the changes to the TV listings.

- I can’t click on a channel and have the listings for that day come up.

- The TV listings on my home page are now much less clickable

- evidently I can’t select a particular hour to list anymore. I get three hour chunks with no control over what is at the leftmost side.

- if you scroll down the listings page it takes a long time for the dynamic listings to display. The previous static listings were much more useable.

This is a huge step backwards in useability.

Marni | December 2nd, 2006 at 8:32 pm

I completely agree with the previous comment–the new format for tv listings is not user-friendsly, take too long to display, can’t select a channel to view for the day, can’t select particular hour spans to view listings. And the aqua color is horrible. Too light. I hope this changes soon, because until it does, we’ll be resorting to other resources. Makes me less likely to stick with Yahoo, actually.

piltok | December 2nd, 2006 at 10:38 pm

http://flickr.com/photos/techbirmingham/307849447/ I came across this photo and i have always been passionate about y! search results. Yahoo has numbered website listings, i could be wrong but while searching if i see number 23 next to the listing, i might think this search engine is not working out for me! Again i could be wrong and y! could be following certain standards but you never know what online users are thinking!

Rich C. | December 3rd, 2006 at 6:28 am

The changes to the TV listings are awful. They lack the functionality of the previous version. The dynamic loading takes too long to display, and is far too resource-intensive. The listings on the home page are almost useless because of the lack of clickable interaction. The customization has been dramatically reduced. There is also a lot of missing program information. This is the perfect example of complicating a simple solution to make it unworkable. Very disappointing, Yahoo! Perhaps you should try to please your users, rather than your inept programmers.

Bill Thompson | December 3rd, 2006 at 9:33 am

I am in total agreement with Mr. Reed’s comments. This Beta version is a HUGE step backwards. It should never have been released as an Alpha (if it was?), never mind a Beta. I smell a rat somewhere at Yahoo! who might be interested in some profits or kickbacks related to this change and who is obviously not the least bit interested in customer satisfaction. (Yeah, I know it is a free service, but without us, the users, you guys wouldn’t have jobs.)

Fix it quick or you’ll all rot in hell.

larry gann | December 3rd, 2006 at 2:19 pm

my tv listing page has changed and I HATE IT.. how do I get the old one
back. it was so simple and clear to read and understand. this one is
the
pits. can’t type in a time a date to see what will be coming on.
doesn’t
tell if it is a rerun or new show. can’t change it by the hour. just
jumps 3 hour levels. … again I HATE IT. and I want my old page back.
Will I ever be able to have access to it again?

It seems almost impossible to contact yahoo directly for answers so I am using this site. hope someone sees it and responds.

Joanne Payne | December 3rd, 2006 at 3:31 pm

I am very disappointed with the new tv guide you discuss here…you took a very good, functional tv guide and upgraded it to one that it barely usable (too long to load, missing or incomplete program information, etc.) and extremely frustrating to use. It forced me to look elsewhere and now I’m starting to use MeeVee. I am hoping that Yahoo will restore the old “classic” guide or make the new one work! (and in the future, please let us know before you change a link to an important feature like this.) Regards. -Joanne

Andrew | December 3rd, 2006 at 8:45 pm

Dear Yahoos:

The continued growth of the brand and finally updating some very old properties (TV and Kids.. with more to come I hope) is the reason I use Yahoo for just about everything I do on the web.

But recent aqusitions seem be getting a little side-tracked. With MS and Google creating online productivity suites, I think an awesome addition to the Yahoo family would be Scrybe. (www.iscrybe.com). Mostly because I would love an update to the aging Y! Calendars, but because I think products like that provide resources to the consistent professional users, not just the periodic community users that services like Bix provide.

This probably wasn’t the place to post this, but I hope it still gets reviewed.

Thanks,

Andrew (acobra2000)
Yahoo user since 1999.

Pao | December 4th, 2006 at 12:59 am

Please go back to the old tv.yahoo.com

Robert Fay | December 4th, 2006 at 9:11 pm

Are you guys aware what a mess the TV listings have been since the change. The times are all wrong. What is up?

RHYAN | December 18th, 2006 at 8:20 am

I AM TIRED OF HEARING ABOUT GOOGLE, YAHOO IS #1 BECAUSE OF THEIR WEBSITE LAYOUT AND BECAUSE THEY HAVE BETTER CATEGORIES. MAYBE IF YAHOO STARTS GIVING OUT MONEY, GIFT CARDS OR REWARDS FOR SEARCHING THROUGH THEIR SITE. THEY CAN HAVE BIG COMPANIES PARTNER WITH THEM EXSCLUSIVELY OR SOMETHING. MAYBE THEY CAN STEAL AWAY GOOGLE USERS.
MAYBE YOU CAN GIVE AWAY 10,000 A DAY, BUT YOU CAN DRAW IN ENOUGH TRAFFIC TO AFFORD TO DO THAT

JAMES | December 18th, 2006 at 8:27 am

I would love that idea, but only if the gift cards or rewards are real and not phony like those pop-ups saying you just won $1,000 dollars. But I would love it and only use yahoo for that reason if the rewards were real

Steve | December 19th, 2006 at 1:53 am

I very much dislike the new maps!!! I need to be able to format the page for printing. I used to be able to copy to Word and do as I will…not no more! Really sucks. Guess I gotta leave Yahoo for something better.

Nicki Dugan | December 20th, 2006 at 9:27 am

Steve:

We made it a easy printing a priority in the new Yahoo! Maps. Just click on othe “printable version” button above the top left corner of the Map. You’ll have the option to print text only, or both text and map.

Note that we will be adding cut and paste functionality for Microsoft Word in an upcoming release, but if you need this functionality now you can switch back to the previous version of Yahoo! Maps by selecting “Dial-Up Map (Original)” in the header, just below the Yahoo! Search box.

Hope that helps!

Nicki Dugan, Editor, Yodel Anecdotal

Linda | April 11th, 2007 at 12:23 pm

Yahoo seems to be including an increasing number of news videos in place of written news articles. I personally find this annoying and a waste of time. I would rather quickly scan a written news article than wait for video to load, sit through a commercial, and only then view the very limited amount of information contained in these clips.

Presumably this move is to accommodate Yahoo users who don’t like to read or perhaps those whose literacy is limited. If you must include videos, can you include the same news in written format for the rest of us?