Anyone actually get to play (meaning you were one of the "lucky" few who got the page delivered to them) with the new Yahoo home page?  I haven’t personally gotten to but according to blogger Tapan Bhat (a Yahoo staffer) it is coming and like its last reincarnation (just a few years ago), it’s got oodles of focus groups, usability experiments and data behind it.  I’ve always found it interesting the conundrum of the Yahoo page. 

For the most part, portals have kind of gone the way of the wind.  The only big competitors in the space (even MSN seems to be being overtaken by Live) are barely hanging on with the proliferation of all sorts of social networks from wikis to microblogs to blogs and mapping systems and mashups and blah blah blah.  But lets face it - the fact is that portals do something that few other sites can do, and as a testament to Yahoo’s continued efforts to delivering it - it continues to thrive. 

And one nice thing for Yahoo is that its customers are loyal.  I am not one to use portal sites.  I like most quasi-techs use Google to search, Live services for some communications, and a host of RSS aggregations for news, microblogs for fun, wikis for info and so on.  But I still use Yahoo for all my domain registration because their control panel is just about the easiest to use, and frankly because I have a weird sense of trust in Yahoo, probably not the least of reasons being that it’s survived for so damn long and strived to improve its services offerings over and over.

You’ve got to admit - look at the task at hand - what an enormous pain in the ass.  Back in 1998 I did some freelance consulting for Yupi, a Spanish-language portal eventually acquired by MSN.  Even in its infancy, the architecture was enormous and trying to wrap ones head around the breadth of information was unbelievably tough.  Of course back then we hadn’t begun to scratch the surface into the power of tagging (meta tags were still king), but even then, I doubt it would have made the job easier.

I have to admit that I’ve always felt that Yahoo does a pretty darn good job of piecing together their homepage.  I can’t quite always say the same for some of the divisions, but definitely the homepage does great for driving the ship.  Check it out,