Yahoo: Hey, look, we can be infinite and social too

Brace yourselves because the news I have to share is big: Yahoo has redesigned its home page. Yes, it’s true, and this one has new CEO Marissa Mayer’s fingerprints all over it.

I know you’ve been holding your breath in feverish anticipation of this ever since Yahoo announced that the darling of Google — and secret heartthrob of millions of geeks around the globe — had agreed to take the big chair at Yahoo last July.

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Or perhaps not. In any case, given that nearly all of her predecessors at Yahoo — the ones who lasted more than a few months at least — had also redesigned the home page at some point, it was inevitable. I’ve lost track of how many home page designs Yahoo has been through over the nearly two decades its been in existence. Needless to say, there have been more than a few, and most of them have not been improvements.

Here’s how Ms. Mayer introduced the latest tablet- and smartphone-friendly Yahoo on the Anecdotal Yodel blog:

Designed to be more intuitive and personal, the new Yahoo! experience is all about your interests and preferences. Since streams of information have become the paradigm of choice on the web, we’re introducing a newsfeed with infinite scroll, letting you experience a virtually endless feed of news articles. Whether you are a sports fanatic or entertainment buff, you can easily customize your newsfeed to your interests. And, to make Yahoo! even more social, you can log in with your Yahoo! or Facebook ID to get articles from thousands of news sources as well as those shared by your friends.

Frankly, the new Mayer Interface doesn’t look all that different from the last home page redo, which occurred some time during the Bartz era. The two biggest differences: If you log into Facebook, the home page will personalize itself based on your Likes and adapt over time; if you don’t give a hoot about, say, horoscopes or stocks, they will eventually drop off the page.

The other part is that, like virtually every uberhip site these days, Yahoo.com offers “infinite scrolling.” You can’t get to the bottom of the page because more stories keep filling in the space.

Remember that last time you went to that all-you-can-eat place and kept on filling your plate even though the food tasted like reprocessed cattle offal because, heck, nobody there was going to stop you? Yahoo is now like that.

What’s amazing to me is how popular Yahoo remains. By nearly every measure, Yahoo is among the five most popular websites on the planet. According to Statista, Yahoo had nearly 165 million unique visitors last month, up from 147 million the previous January.

Yet nobody I know ever talks about Yahoo the way they talk about Google or Facebook or Twitter or Apple or Microsoft or, er, almost everyone else. Heck, even LinkedIn gets more attention. Yahoo just doesn’t come up.

What does the rest of the world think about the new design? Depends on who you ask, naturally. Huffington Post’s Craig Kanalley gives it two big thumbs-up:

The killer feature of the new Yahoo homepage is the news feed. I’ve already found it addicting; I found myself checking back several times yesterday at work — and after work when I got home — to see the latest news it highlights. Presumably based on my Facebook likes and interests, it indeed served up news I wanted to read, consistently….

For me, it worked. Instantly. That simple. It didn’t require any work on my end, like many personalization services do, and I appreciate that.

On the other hand, GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram says it’s a fresh coat of paint on a rusted, old bucket:

Mayer is right that streams have become the paradigm of choice, but that particular boat set sail a long time ago — Facebook first introduced the News Feed, which has become the go-to news and information source for hundreds of millions of people, in 2006….

It’s true that Yahoo still has hundreds of millions of loyal users, but then so does AOL’s dial-up business — in other words, there may still be value there, but it is in a process of gradual (and likely accelerating) decline.

Comparing Yahoo to AOL’s AARP-focused dial-up business? Oh, that’s gonna leave a mark.

The problem Yahoo is facing, says Quartz writer Chris Mims, isn’t that people don’t care about Yahoo. It’s that they don’t care about home pages any more. Deep links are the end-all and be-all these days.

Like other titans of another tech age, Yahoo is facing an existential threat against which it may be defenseless: People just don’t surf the web the way they used to. It is now the rule, rather than the exception, to share links over Facebook, Twitter and “dark social” (e.g., email or text messages), which means that most people are arriving on pages buried deep within websites, and may never go near the homepage.

Can Mayer restore Yahoo to whatever luster it might once have had? A few tweaks to the home page aren’t going to do it, but she says that’s only the beginning.

Then again, look at Microsoft. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week noted that 50 percent of digital hipsters between the ages of 18 and 29 think Microsoft is “cooler than it was” a year or two ago, beating Twitter (47 percent) and Facebook (42 percent).

Of course, given how relentlessly uncool Microsoft has been throughout most of its 38-year existence, it was not a high bar to surpass — just slightly above one of those wheelchair curbs. But the fact that it’s reaching the young ‘uns has to take some of the sting out of its sub-3 percent mobile market share.

Back in the Web 1.0 days, Yahoo was so cool it had to wear shades. Maybe it could happen again. Stranger things have happened.

Do you still Yahoo? And if so, why? Yodel your thoughts below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Yahoo: Hey, look, we can be infinite and social too,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.