Yahoo 360 Getting Buzz
Lots of people have been talking about Yahoo 360, which is going live in four days. Yahoo has let some people look at it, and here’s what they had to say:
The feature set that i saw included integrated YIM, a blogging tool, a recommendations engine (linked to local), photos (linked to Y photos, not Flickr) and a social network. It’s all very integrated and emphasizes Yahoo products (although they were talking about connecting it with other products and they are doing some RSS stuff). Throughout all of this are heavy controls for privacy/publication, although it is all strict categorization schemes where you can make things available to groups (think: LJ).Of course, it has all of the social problems of bi-directional, articulated social networks (nothing solved there). And the controls are really overwhelming. In fact, a lot of the product is overwhelming for the not-technically-savvy and i think that this will be their major problem unless they figure out how to slowly expose things (one of our strongest recommendations). For the techgeek, it will feel like they didn’t go far enough, didn’t have enough features, etc. That’s actually a lot easier to solve than the overwhelming problem and i expect they’ll build new features soon so i think that the techgeeks should wait. But i’m really worried about the novice user because it has many of the problems of blogging, privacy and social networks rolled into one big problem. Plus, you really need to be heavily integrated into the Yahoo network for it to really make sense.
Anyhow, my general impression is that i’m wary, but i don’t think that this is for me and i think it will be nice for the heavily integrated Yahoo user.
Central to the whole service is the concept that you want to communicate and connect with the people that you already know, rather than try to meet new people. To this end, your home page on the service shows the most recent content published by people within your network. This might be a blog post, a photo album, review, or an updated profile item. This page is constantly refreshed as the people in your network update the information on their spaces. This fundamental concept of linking people through their updated “stuff” is what makes Yahoo! 360 unique – and inherently will drive usage of the service higher than traditional social networks. In essence, the content is being pushed to you by the service.The service will be made available to a “select group of beta testers” on the morning of March 29th. Those beta testers will be allowed to invite as many people as they would like – no limits are being set. One thing about the beta – it appears that Yahoo! has a detailed roadmap of improvements that they plan to make to the service, with several becoming available after the beta launch date. Gasp! A real beta! So I’m expecting a lot of glitches, changes, and general growing pains…but I’m setting aside a couple of hours already on Tuesday to get my 360 service up and going.
(some via Jeremy Zaawodny)
