Yahoo! started testing a new home page last week. After testing it myself, I feel it looks cleaner and the icons look fresher.

The most prominent is the addition of My Favourites panel on the left. Yahoo! has taken off the applications box on the right, which used to have Mail, Messenger, Puzzles, Weather, Events and Horoscopes. It has now been replaced with popular searches. The news image is much larger, making the Web page more attractive. The news slider also looks pretty cool.

The biggest change is the left-hand column of ?links?. As a post on Yahoo!?s corporate blog explains, Yahoo! is giving up on the idea of building a Web portal around its own services.

You can easily choose from a dashboard of more than 65 apps to add di-rectly to your homepage, including different e-mail providers (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail), content sites (Barron?s, NPR, USA Today), popular social networking sites (Facebook and MySpace) and many others. These apps let you preview, let you interact with, or navigate to your favourite sites

from one easy check-in point. The app maker lets you create your own app on the fly by adding virtually any URL

of your choice.

Yahoo! has also moved Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, and other Yahoo! services over to the My Favourites section. When you hover over any of these widgets, a display pops up with an advertisement and your information. This pop-out also contains an ad on the right-hand side, to enable Yahoo! to make money. This ad is not contextually targeted, I tried many apps, including a few added by me, and the ad was always the same.

My Favourite application looks really interesting, since it allowed me to view some of my popular applications without leaving the Yahoo! Web page, so it?s convenient for Mail, Finance, and potentially a few others.

Update status is added on the top, it lets you add a status, like Facebook does. It is surprising that Yahoo! didn?t have it earlier, every social networking platform has a way of updating status. Also?a very big mistake?there is no ability to update status to the popular microblogging service Twitter on this part of the homepage, as yet.

Add New App works nicely, I added Techmeme, Slashdot.org, Rediff.com and the PubMatic blog, and it worked well. Even though Yahoo! failed to add the image icon almost every time, it showed me the snippet of the Web pages and they looked cool. But the content shows up in a box about 400 pixels wide, so one cannot view the content for many sites. The entire animation and presentation, though, is awesome.

The news box has been moved down. Though, there is a small arrow-icon on the left using which you can move the news up. From a technical standpoint these are very cool features, however, I don?t know if these would make people stay longer at the Yahoo! home page. I am also not sure whether Yahoo!?s users will take the time to customise the new home page to take advantage of its added functionality. Changing Web portal settings is done by geeks, I don?t think many people configure these settings.

The change is an important one for Yahoo!, since its front page is perhaps its most powerful calling card to users and advertisers, as well as to Wall Street. Yahoo!?s homepage gets 330 million unique visitors every month, so this change will be viewed and used by that many users.

Tapan Bhat, SVP of integrated consumer experiences at the company, said in an interview: ?This is probably the most fundamental revisiting of the Yahoo! home page since the beginning of Yahoo!.?

The My Favorites panel is very interesting and sleek. However, many of the apps did not work for me, for example, Facebook didn?t work at all. Login to Facebook leads to an error (bad certificate). The way it was supposed to work is?if you bring the mouse on the Facebook selection under My Favorites, you will get a pop-out of their accounts without having to even click into the app. Facebook is supposed to be one of the most useful apps on this panel, too bad it didn?t work for me. Games and Maps didn?t work for me, as was the case with Messenger application. The Messenger application did bring me the list of my contacts while I hovered the mouse, however, when I clicked on any of the contacts, it threw up an error in FireFox, which means that the Messenger application has not been tested on FireFox.

Overall, I feel a lot of work has gone into this change and Yahoo! has managed to make its homepage even more interactive and useful. The applications concept is not new, but Yahoo! has done it in a unique way.

The writer is co-founder & VP-engineering, PubMatic