Portals are Dead! Long Live the Portal!

Does anyone else hear the term “Yahoo! Life” and think “My Yahoo!”? Is there really much difference?

When CEO Jerry Yang got on the stage on Monday to announce a few sketchy details of the Yahoo! Life initiative (not truly a working name, by the way), he said, “At Yahoo we want to be most essential starting point for your life.” Hmm, sounds familiar. Let’s wind back the Internet time clock to 1996:

“My Yahoo! puts our users in control, allowing them to receive personally relevant information when they want it.” - Jeff Mallett, Yahoo! SVP business operations, July 1996

The press release goes on to note one additional feature: “With My Agent, users can discover music, movies, and books that match their interests, and communicate with others who share similar tastes.”

The Yahoo! Life initiative puts email at the center, making it more relevant by prioritizing mail from important people. And by opening up its platform to third-party developers, Yahoo! says it will be able to display widgets that pop up when you mouse over certain words in email messages.

OK, sure, the technologies are updated and the content is widgified and the email-as-the-center-of-your-social-network idea is worth exploring, but I honestly don’t see much that’s totally new here. Do you?