New Yahoo Home Page Caught In The Wild

Yahoo’s new home page was supposed to have launched to the general public by now, but Yahoo insiders say new CEO Carol Bartz wanted to slow things down a bit and conduct more user testing. Testing is currently being conducted, our source says, in the UK, U.S., India and France to a small percentage of users.

We wanted to get a look at what the new home page looks like in the wild, and put out a call to our Twitter friends. UK reader Andrew Lawson sent in the screenshot above.

This live version of the homepage is very similar to the mockups Yahoo supplied last September. A few things have been rearranged and fonts have been altered, but the layout is largely the same.

All the action will occur on the left sidebar, where users can access key applications (including third party apps) and expand them to take up more of the page. In the mockups the only third party application shown was eBay. The live version also contains a BBC and MySpace module.

The live version also has an “add application” button that Yahoo said was to come later. Given that Yahoo has 82 million daily visitors to its home page, I expect just about everyone out there to be quickly building their own modules for users to add.