Incidentally, I think I answered the survey incorrectly, saying that my own home page came up first. The next time I started up the browser I remembered that when I got a new computer a few months ago I hadn’t bothered to change off the Firefox default page. But as a result of the survey, I’ve now switched to news.google.com.

Yahoo! Messenger has some really great features built into it, I was going to post a whole separate blog entry at some point since I’m so impressed. So stay tuned, although in the meantime you may want to just download it and try it out.

By the way, I also realized that it’s up to one’s settings as to whether new content added to the page is pasted on top or bottom. This is just a follow-up to my previous note about how to add the Currency Converter.

That personalising stuff was present early on in the internet days. Not that I thought it was useful then.

and

The same, at least as long.

Keith and Bob – I just realized that your estimate is probably a bit high. When I was looking for info about when My Yahoo! kicked off (for this post) I recall finding relevant screenshots for 1999. I don’t think My Yahoo! was available yet eight years ago. I may be wrong, but I have a feeling I checked out yahoo.com archives for 1996, 1997 and 1998 back then.

Of course this is a minor point here, the point is that you’ve been using it for a long time and it works well for you.

But the issue does raise concerns about people’s ability to estimate when they started using certain services. That poses another challenge for those of us studying stuff like this and trying to collect those types of data. How do you ask about events that occured over a few years ago that have few anchors for people to estimate them correctly? I should go back to the literature and read up on this.

Abb1 – I may have a different My Yahoo! interface (I never know since they seem to do some things differently for Yahoo! SBC DSL subscribers and even when I log out of my account it’s not clear if what they’re showing me is generic), but in case it’s similar, here is how you can add a currency converter.

Click on “Add Content”. (On my screen this is toward the upper left corner.) In the “Find Content” box enter currency and press Find. The first result is Currency Converter from Yahoo! Finance. Click on the Add button to the left of it. Voila. It’s been added to your My Yahoo! content. (It’ll be on the bottom of the page, but you can change its position by clicking on “edit” and then “Move Up”.)

If you want to change which rates are automatically displayed, just click on “edit” in the upper right corner of the Currency Converter box once you’re viewing your My Yahoo! page and choose different ones from the menu.

Disagree. Everyone belongs on the web, not just a self-styled elite. As a society, we should be teaching people how to control their own on-line experience, though.

On topic: I use a blank page, and I’m always surprised so few people do likewise.

Can be done. Prior to my last spyware meltdown and rebuild I had yen, renminbi, and euros. Way too early for the lady to remember how she did it for me. Patience, I will toss it OT into some Henry education thread.

The same, at least as long. It is usually open and minimized. Includes ten boxes of headline links(5-10), Stock market, search box, local weather(3) local sports scores, calculator, thesaurus, dictionary, tv listings, maps, photos, and much more.

IE has “open link in new window” and I often have at least 5 windows open. As far as I can tell, each new window takes about 2 meg of ram. Got a gig. Animated advertising and such bullshit eats bandwidth invisibly and is the only problem I run into.