The dominant portal/search Yahoo! Japan is testing a customized portal for office workers.
On Yahoo! Japan’s top page, which is the most viewed page in Japan by the way, a new button “Office Version” is showed up at the best position on the top banner menu.
Once you clicked it, your Yahoo top page is switched to the office version, which has sombre colour and simpler design.
The regular version looks like this,
Many “Not good for work” menus are removed. Removed links are Shopping, Auction, Leisure Trip, Sports and Entertainment news, TV, Movie and Gyao!(online movie), Job search 😉 , Real estate, Automotive, Forum, Blog, Apparel, Dating, Game, Fortune telling, Kids. Movie and Product search are also removed from search tabs.
So this is the portal having only things which employers want to show their employees in Japan, at least Yahoo! Japan thinks so. As both the regular and office version have the same URL, seems switched by browser cookies, and each user can easily switch between them by pressing button, companies cannot filter the regular version usage.
But in some offices your boss may peek which version of Yahoo! you are using over your shoulder in future.
About office portal, Cyber Agent and Cybozu’s joint venture Cybozu.net [J] runs “only business” portal. Although it does not exclude contents for fun so strictly as Yahoo!’s office version, the portal seems to be acknowledged and encouraged in some companies.
This office version will be out of beta in next spring in Yahoo! Japan’s plan.
[disclosure] Akky is hired by Cybozu’s subsidiary as a tech blogger.
See Also:
Yahoo! Japan PR blog entry on this beta test [J]
