Yahoo behind Google in terms of Personalization

Yahoo announced a new beta version of My Yahoo. Here is a screencast. On the Read/WriteWeb blog, Richard MacManus writes "Essentially it's Yahoo finally upgrading its long-running personalized homepage, with a new design more closely aligned to yahoo.com, splashes of Ajax and dollaps of personalization". In an earlier post he writes "It will at first be a private beta, with a limited number of users being offered a beta account at http://cm.my.yahoo.com/upgrade. Yahoo's plan is to gather feedback from those early users and then make the My Yahoo! beta more broadly available - with additional features - over the coming months" and lists some of the new beta features:

• pre-built personalized page for each user, based on data Yahoo has already gleaned from their usage of Yahoo properties - the design of the page is closely aligned with yahoo.com;
• Category pages for topics such as cooking, plus "content suggestions";
• Users can further customize their page with drag-and-drop modules, and new four-column and small search box layouts;
• Feed previews and a full post reader on the page;
• Editable Personal Assistant with instant access to things like Yahoo! Mail, horoscopes, local traffic, etc;
• Redesigned modules from Yahoo! and select partners, with games, music, commerce, sports updates, weather, finance portfolios, TV listings, etc;
• Sharing feature, enabling users to send their My Yahoo! page or favorite modules to friends and family - note, this is very similar to Pageflakes' sharing feature, only Yahoo told me that their sharing service doesn't require sign-ups;
• More "new interactive modules" to come

To note that Yahoo is far behind google in terms of personalized Ajax-enabled start pages. Google's Personalized Homepage is an early adopter of Ajax and has already most of the features of the new My Yahoo beta. Moreover, Yahoo plans in the future to integrate Yahoo Widgets with My Yahoo. On Google's Personalized Homepage widgets (gadgets) are already there!