Yahoo!'s homepage was once a place where people can read top headlines, keep up with sports news and scores, get stock updates and more.
As good as it was and trying to get back on track against the competition, users' experience on mobile however weren't the same. In this case, Yahoo! wants to get back on track by launching a rebranded version of its flagship application. The name goes with Yahoo Newsroom.
The goal of the new app is to compete with the already abundant sources where users can start their day with news.
Besides providing its own contents, Yahoo News works just like other news aggregators where news are gathered from numerous resources, put under their own categories, and gathered into one place.
Yahoo Newsroom aims to offer personalized experience with the "Explore' section where users can browser through its available topics, ranging from U.S. News, Politics, Finance, Lifestyle, Celebrity, Sports and more.
In the app, topics are called "Vibes." These are essentially communities where users can read, discuss, and debate topics with people who might share common interests.
Yahoo Newsroom also collect users' usage data. So the more a user use the app, read and interact with its stories, the more it will understand the user's interest. The news will then become more tailored and specified to the user's interest over time, according to Yahoo!.
"Yahoo Newsroom is a revolutionary news app that's powered by the people, for the people."
What's different about Yahoo Newsroom is that the app also encourages users to actively participate. They can as well post articles they found from the web into the Vibes section in order to spark discussion and internet's viral nature.
While this can bolster its user engagement and interaction, news that have been powered by algorithms and machine-learning are vulnerable to defects and can pose trouble. Here Yahoo! needs to keep out spam and other malicious contents from populating its feed. It need to hold well against crowdsourced news-gathering.
But Yahoo! aims to be an alternative out of the many. With people now having Apple News and Facebook News Feed, Yahoo Newsroom wants to elevate the social pressure by allowing users to engage in open discussion.
"The platform that enables you to speak your mind, free from social pressure and engage in open discussion around what you see," said Yahoo!.
Yahoo Newsroom is live now on iOS and Android.