Yahoo!’s personalized portal My.Yahoo! is now available in a new version. Yahoo! users can choose to stay with the old look and feel of the site or switch to the new beta here.

My.Yahoo! is a page with customizable modules containing various information: RSS feeds, weather info, cooking recipes, news and the like. The competition is strong in this field and consists - among others - of Netvibes, Pageflakes, Google Homepage and recently My.Netscape. However, unlike Netscape’s bland offering, though, Yahoo! has really improved the site, adding several new features.

My.Yahoo! is now custom-tailored to each user based on his individual needs, info on which is gathered from the usage of various Yahoo! services. It has also gone some way to ensure that even less customization-savvy users can enjoy it without much tinkering. Standard drag-and-drop boxes containing widgets and RSS feeds can be moved around (though not as smoothly as on Daily Rotation or Netvibes), and content can be arranged in tabs and in 2, 3 or 4 columns for each tab. Users can now share their My.Yahoo! page or individual modules (this is available under the Edit - Share menu for each module) with others, similar to what PageFlakes and Netvibes already offer. Visually, My.Yahoo! looks good and fits in the overall Yahoo! look, plus it offers several themes you can apply to your My.Yahoo! page. Lastly, the Yahoo! team promises to introduce new features in the months to come.

See that ad? I’m sure you do. And no, you cannot remove it.

The downsides? First, there’s a pretty big, ugly, annoying and unmovable ad on each tab, which is enough to scare me away back to Netvibes. Secondly, there are no third party modules, which are one of the greatest strengths of Netvibes, but there is quite a number of available modules from Yahoo! which might be enough for less demanding users.

Overall, although Yahoo! has done a good job with the new My.Yahoo!, I still feel almost the same as I’ve felt when I was reviewing the (undoubtedly much worse) My.Netscape. There’s a lot of competition in this space, innovations are hard to come by, and Yahoo! didn’t really offer that many. Furthermore, in certain areas and small details (like resizable columns, for instance) they still trail behind the competition, so while My.Yahoo! will most probably be just great for previous My.Yahoo! users, I doubt it will get a lot of converts from users who are used to other services.