My Yahoo! Blog

User Spotlight: Tim P.

In the words of long-time My Yahoo! user Tim, ”I like a ton of information at my finger tips.” Naturally, we were more than happy to deliver it to him.

Tim began with a simple need for centralizing all the news and information he was getting online. As more news sources became available — and his interests expanded — he just kept bringing in more and more information that’s important to him.

These days (five years and five pages of content later), Tim has plenty of feeds on his pages. His favorite topics are Finance, Sports and Travel, with each having its own fully-loaded page. On top of that, Tim has his “favorites” from all topics filling up one single page. To accommodate this, he uses the popular 4-column format. This format is perfect for scanning (which he does every 30 minutes throughout the day — and often well into the night).

Here are some of Tim’s favorite feeds:
• Kiplinger Personal Finance
• Personal finance news - CNNMoney.com
• Yahoo! Sports – NCAA Football News
• Top Stories from AP

Tim also uses lots of tools available through My Yahoo!:
• Yahoo! Travel Best Fare Tracker
• AA Domestic Next Weekend Net SAAver Fares
• Weather (Is it sunny in Tahiti today?)
• Stock Portfolio
• Maps
• Package Tracker

Take a look at one of Tim’s pages, you might see something you’ll want to add to your page:

Join the Spotlight! Tell us your story.

Hearing how people use My Yahoo! inspires us (and hopefully, you). That’s why we’re starting a series of postings here that focus on individual users. Visit these pages to get useful ideas…or simply marvel at the breadth of personalization that’s out there.

Each person’s My Yahoo! page is different, and we’re looking for stories from users who have interesting ways of using My Yahoo!. To participate, send an email to insidemyy@yahoo.com.

Shop ’til you drop!

I’ll ‘fess up to a minor shopping addiction. The only thing that prevents it from being a real problem is that I keep it virtual. Just like glossy catalogs once did, shopping blogs now hold a special place in my heart.

Shopping feeds fall into a few categories. You’ve got the daily deals like Woot! that you need to watch—I keep those at the top of my page where I’m sure to notice them. Then there are browsing blogs like Mighty Goods that pull together neat items from all over the Web; for me, those are the most tempting time-suckers, so I tuck them down at the bottom of the page.

I moved recently, so I like to keep a couple of blogs about household-items on my page like decor8 and Apartment Therapy. I’m also looking for ways to make my life as green as possible, so I look to ecofabulous for virtuous shopping tips.

Last but not least, there are blogs all about the joys of finding neat stuff. Check out the hilarious posts from “The Office” writer/actor Mindy Kaling, and the unique product reviews at The Impulsive Buy.

Too frivolous, you say? Well, I’ve anchored the page with the highly informative and useful Consumerist.

Add my shopping page to your My Yahoo! and see how easy it is to while away the hours with some virtual window shopping.

Happy bargain hunting,

Rebecca
My Yahoo! editor

Joie de My Yahoo!.

Hello out there in My Yahoo! land,

I’ve been using My Yahoo! for many years, so it was pretty exciting when I got the chance to join the team last summer. Like many of you, I found my first exposure to the new product to be a little bit rough (of course, it wasn’t even an “alpha” back then). I also discovered that working on a product makes it just that–work. So by this spring, I was hardly using My Yahoo! anymore, except as part of my job.

But then, a few weeks ago, something changed. I found myself at home on a Saturday afternoon using My Yahoo! to check movie showtimes at a nearby theater, get a laugh from a couple of my favorite humor blogs, read up on some recipes, and catch up on news about my personal interests. After about an hour of contented puttering around on My “just for fun,” it hit me: my dormant “joie de My Yahoo!” had re-awakened!

As a product manager who spends a lot of time thinking about the user experience, this made me pretty happy, because it was a clear sign that we are on the right track with the new My Yahoo!. There’s no doubt that we’ve still got work to do, but I’m confident we’ll get there.

Before I sign off, here’s a little trick I discovered: you can make a “backup” of any of your My Yahoo! pages using the “Share this page” feature. Just share the page with yourself! You’ll get an e-mail with a link that you can use to restore the page should you ever accidentally delete it, misplace one of your favorite modules, etc.

Thanks for your time and continued usage of My Yahoo!.

–james
My Yahoo! Product Manager

Improved: Stock Portfolios

If you’ve been using the Stock Portfolios to monitor the ups and downs of your investments, we’ve got some new features for you to play with!

Quick information. Just place your cursor on the callout next to the ticker symbol in your portfolio, and intraday charts and news headlines will appear in a hover bubble.

Organize to your heart’s content. Create multiple portfolios and categorize your stocks however you want… ”long term”, “short term”, “401K”, “just watching”…or whatever works for you. Each portfolio accommodates cash positions and tallies things up to show a cumulative gain/loss.

Easy data entry. Editing the information in each portfolio is MUCH easier than before. Just click “edit” and enter your data.

Bunch more stuff. Now you get % change (in addition to value change), an up/down indicator, a refresh link, and support for international equities and foreign exchange rates.

While we can’t promise better value performance of your portfolio, we do think that keeping an eye on it will be much easier.

This is one of our most popular modules and we’re excited to provide you with some enhancements. Your ideas have been very helpful, keep them coming.

Happy investing!

Express yourself with new themes.

It’s time to shake up your pages with one of the new background themes!

We’ve created a bunch of new textures, colors and artwork for you to personalize your pages. And we’ll keep adding more and more. Here are some samples to give you a taste of what you’ll find:

Waves

Bubbles

Cooking

Check ‘em out (Personalize This Page > Change Color).