Well, this heading seemed awfully broad, but once I logged into My Yahoo! and started editing things, I can see how it stands alone as its own "thing." I also looked at iGoogle a bit, but although it had some widgets that I would prefer and that My Yahoo! doesn't have (like Humor/Comics, Recipes/Cooking, and the ability to link to Youtube), I like the layout of My Yahoo! better, and use my Yahoo! account more than my Google one, most of the time.
What really struck me was the immediate and in-depth customization options for the pages. You choose or create themes, layouts, add the content types that you want on the page, drag and drop to put them in the right place, and it still contains all the Quicklinks found on the lefthand side of Yahoo.com, so you can still quickly navigate around the Yahoo! universe. What I really liked was how my e-mail account was integrated right into the page - not as a fully-fledged e-mail account (I can't move or delete e-mails), but I can read them simply by hovering over the e-mail title and a popup will display the email body, plus I can write and reply e-mails from right there. Next, I added a movie widget - not because I go see movies very much, which I (unfortunately) don't, but because, without television, I've found myself not even hearing about a movie until it's in theaters, and I like to at least keep abreast of what's out there, even if I can't go see it. So, I thought that was super-cool, since I rarely remember to go browsing for movies, anyway. I added a few extra news feeds that sounded interesting, removed a few things (like Horoscopes) that are complete wastes of space for me, and shuffled everything around a bit. Overall, it has a lot of potential to take everything I may be interested in and condense it so I can browse it at a glance.
I was never a fan of online calendar programs, preferring to tack a calendar to my wall and scribble my most important things to remember on it, but since coming to the UW, I've been forced to adopt the MyCalendar widget integrated into every student's UW account. It never really came in much handy until this past week; my adviser is super-busy this semester, and has more distance students than normal to advise about class registration, so she decided we could all pick our own schedule times by syncing our calendar with hers and picking an available date/time. Granted, I plan to remember to go to registry advising due to the note scribbled on my wall calendar, but I wouldn't have been able to make an appointment at all if I hadn't had MyCalendar loaded up like I did, so they can definitely come in handy, too.
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