• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, February 7, 2011

 The New York Times reported today that Yahoo will unveil plans for a more personalized mobile platform at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week. The app-publishing system would draw on a user's stated preference, and search and social media activity to show the most relevant content to a user.

That sounds awfully familiar. In 2009, the Web portal made a big push behind a revamped home page that let people more easily connect to Facebook, Gmail and other outside sites and applications, as well as featuring more customized news and status updates from various social networks. Earlier the same year, the company launched Yahoo Mobile at the Mobile World Congress with the promise of putting users' favorite apps and content easily at hand on phones. You can go all the way back to My Yahoo, for that matter, one of the site's early efforts at offering greater site personalization to users.

The Times article also notes that Yahoo's latest mobile plans reflect broader recent custom content services like the iPad app Flipboard for assembling social networking feeds in a magazine-style layout. During Yahoo's fourth-quarter conference call, CEO Carol Bartz said the company would "continue to unveil a slew of apps for iOS, Android and more." Yahoo CFO Tim Morse also said that mobile was a big "growth area" for the company, though Yahoo has yet to provide any backing for that claim. unlike Google's saying last fall that its mobile business had hit a $1 billion annualized run rate.

Exactly what mobile initiative Yahoo will roll out next week isn't clear. But the heavily marketed relaunch of Yahoo's customizable home page hardly helped reverse the company's sagging fortunes. It cut about 5% of its work force in December and January, as fourth quarter revenue dropped 12%.

Yahoo faces the same problems in mobile as on the desktop--a commanding lead in search held by Google and fast-growing Facebook closing in on Yahoo in monthly U.S. traffic and users worldwide. Meanwhile, Google and Apple control the apps market through their respective mobile platforms and app storefronts. Internally, Yahoo's mobile division has been hampered by high turnover, including the departures most recently of top executives David Ko and David Katz.

With its main competitors focused on mobile and its own broader challenges trying to restore growth, it's hard to see further personalization of Yahoo's mobile properties making much difference in its efforts to keep up with rivals on mobile devices --  or otherwise.