Here are the screenshots Yahoo published of its upcoming homepage redesign. The big change is that instead of including a long list of Yahoo products and services on the left side of the very popular homepage, there's now a large gray box for Yahoo and third-party created widgets, which will link to places like Yahoo's photo-sharing service Flickr and auction site eBay. The redesign also reveals that like AOL, Yahoo seems to think people will use the portal more if they can check their Gmail there.

I'm skeptical, because since when are Gmail users looking for a portal to bookmark as their homepage? We heard Yahoo tried to get Facebook to design a widget for the new space on Yahoo's homepage, but that so far Mark Zuckerberg and company have refused. Kind of like how they refused Yahoo's $1 billion offer to buy the company two years ago, relegating Yahoo to redesigns that seem little more than deckchair shuffling on a sinking ship.

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