As Yahoo! rolls out their new homepage design, I've been asking various friends what their thoughts are on the new look-and-feel. The reactions has been mixed although none have been outright negative. Initially, I thought that those who didn't like the new look was because it was such a big change and change is not always welcomed. Some things aren't necessarily the best, but they work and people can get what they need out of them without much thinking.

After awhile, I started to ask myself why is it that I liked the new Yahoo homepage and while there are many different reasons, I thought that maybe one of the reason is that Yahoo homepage is beginning to be more of an "application" then an online publication.

As a software engineer, I like building applications and I'm not so inclined to build online content. One is a problem that challenges me while the other is equivalent of data entry (remember that this is from the perspective of engineers who aren't being paid to be creative writers so they are usually handed the content from "writers" and are told by non-engineers to "implement" the articles).

I guess I'm saying that I liked the web initially because it was more about programming (software engineer). Then it became more about content layout and it got boring (web developers). As the balance went back towards programming and application, it became challenging again (frontend engineers).