ReveNews
Yahoo 360: Social Network from Yahoo… finally!
Yahoo 360 is here. I have wondered for a while why Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft (still in beta with Three Degrees which seems to be for teenagers only and not adults) weren’t taking over social networking. Barry Diller got into the game when he bought ZeroDegrees.
Of course, it doesn’t look like anyone has proven the promise of social networking yet. Remember Friendster? Have you heard anything since Friendster raised a lot of money from several big names. You can find me on Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, ZeroDegrees, or Ryze… not that I have found much use for them. The best use of one I have seen was the guy who sold inviatations to Orkut using Google’s own AdWords as his only sales tool.
Orkut has one feature that still strikes me as amazing. One person, Orkut, was put in the system. He invited, either directly or indirectly, everyone there. If you are in Orkut, you are connected to Orkut himself.
Randy Farmer wrote in the Yahoo Search Blog about Yahoo 360 being me-centric as opposed to we-centric. It makes sense given how much Yahoo knows about me.
My pondering about Yahoo had to do with all of its assets containing my personal information. Yahoo knows who my friends are (Yahoo Instant Messenger and Yahoo Mail address book), my interests (Yahoo Groups and My Yahoo selections, where I live (nice for Yahoo Local and local search), the sports teams I follow (Go Bears and Pac-10), the cities I might want to travel to (weather on My Yahoo), the stocks I follow (My Yahoo and Yahoo Finance). Just think about the power of the network knowledge from YIM and Groups alone.
Yahoo 360 gives a way to organize that coupled with blogging capabilities. Plus, Yahoo recently bought Flickr. Flickr has an amazingly loyal group of users for photo blogging. I wish I’d thought of that when I was posting my kids pictures online from 1998-2002. I’d probably still be doing it if it had been that easy and part of my routine.
The Yahoo 360 beta started this week by invitation only. If you are interested in an invitation, send me an e-mail to [my_first_name] [at] 77blue.com.
