My Yahoo beta is fine if you're from Idaho

IS IT JUST US or is it beginning to feel a bit like dot-com days again? Comms and ASP IPOs are in the works courtesy of Clearwire and NetSuite, Netscape is back in the ring and now Yahoo is upgrading its My Yahoo consumer portal site.

Consumer portals? We remember those. You tell them you're interested in football, politics and the weather and you're automatically updated on the Cincinatti Juggernauts, yet another Clinton or Bush and the fact that it's raining in Des Moines. Great, now I am fully prepared for the day. But as huge fans of Yahoo email and lapsed portal users of many years standing we signed up for the upgrade this morning, assuming times have changed.

So what's going on in the wicked world? The My Yahoo beta knows enough about me to stick in a UK Tesco advert but not enough to assume I might want local content.

OK, so we're not so caught up in British protocol to worry about the Americanism ‘Sports' for a section header but really what are the chances that I'm going to care about baseball news? And I honestly don't know what Champ Car News entails.

Ah, here's a section called Yahoo UKIE Sports News. "There's no content for this feed."

What else? Indian Cricket News. "There's no content for this feed." What, on the eve of the World Cup.

TV listings? All American.

Weather? Empty.

Calendar? "A new module is scheduled to appear in this spot shortly.”

Reuters Arts and Stage has one entry: “Bosnan joining Streep in Mamma Mia!”

Go on then: "Former James Bond star Pierce Brosnan is in final negotiations to join Meryl Streep in the movie version of the popular Abba musical…"

Right, that's it, I've had enough of this nonsense.

Yahoo has great mail and calendar tools but I don't know what My Yahoo can do for me that I can't do better by using a bit of common sense. And touting alpha-grade services is taking this community-testing business too far.

Next! µ