These days, everyone knows what Yahoo! is and probably use several Yahoo! tools. It is a global Internet services company that operates an Internet portal and provides a full range of products and services including a search engine, the Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Flickr.com and Yahoo! 360⁰. The idea was first generated by two electrical engineering graduate students, Jerry Yang and David Filo from Stanford University, USA.

How Yahoo! Incorporated

In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo created a website named “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. In April 1994 “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was renamed Yahoo!. By the end of 1994, Yahoo! had already received one million hits and Yang and Filo realized that their website had huge business potential. [1]

Yahoo 360⁰

Yahoo! has created numerous services which include Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Messenger. Today we will talk about a service that many people might not know about - Yahoo! 360⁰.

In March 2005, Yahoo! decided to launch a Social Media Networking website called Yahoo 360⁰, which put them in the SMM race. It includes services like social networking, blogging and photo sharing and it still is in beta version.

Yahoo 360⁰ is a good service but it has failed to gain as much response as Yahoo’s other services. As a social networking tool it will do well, and it is more useful to those who were already using other Yahoo! services since they can fully integrate the service with Yahoo! Mail, Photos, My Yahoo! and Groups. Yahoo 360⁰ pulls all of these different services together into one easy-to-use interface. Another feature Yahoo 360⁰ provides is basic blogging. For bloggers Yahoo 360⁰ provides some nice features, but it also comes with drawbacks.

Let’s take a look at some pros and cons of blogging on Yahoo 360^0.

Pros

The first advantage is that Yahoo 360⁰ is totally free, and it provides blogroll lists. The RSS feed is automatic. Yahoo 360⁰ provides the facility of moblogging, which is a blog published directly to the web from a mobile phone or device. Another advantage is their easy-to-use WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) program for creating web pages.

Cons

Sometimes the pages just go blank while editing, which is frustrating for users. The URL for each blog is structured like a subfolder, or a subdomain. Users are not able to change the time zone setting for their blog. There is no trackback option, no pings and very limited customization for blogs. These are some problems that are preventing bloggers from utilizing Yahoo 360⁰.

More bad news

Jerry yang announced that they would no longer provide support for or perform bug fixes on Yahoo! 360°. Passionate Yahoo 360⁰ users got infuriated after hearing that news.

In October 2007, Matt Warburton, Yahoo! Community Manager said in his blog:

“On Yahoo’s Q3 Earnings call today, it was announced that we intend to transition Yahoo! 360 to a more integrated Yahoo! experience in early 2008. I want to provide additional information on this news and assure you that we will minimize any disruption to you and our valued Yahoo! 360 community. I also want to assure you that you can still use all the features of Yahoo! 360 until this transition takes place in early 2008.

“We will be sharing specifics of this transition over the next several months, but I can tell you today that Yahoo! 360 will transition to a new universal Yahoo! profile that will be closely tied to other relevant services across Yahoo!, and will include improved blogging capabilities.

“With the announcement of this transition, we assure you:

• We will preserve your Yahoo! 360 blog content, profile photo, nickname, and friends lists during and after the transition
• We will provide the right tools to move your blog content;
• We will give you ample notice before this transition begins in early 2008.”[2]

Yahoo 360⁰ is a nice service to use, but they have already taken themselves out of the race. If you are looking for a free, hosted service for blogging, Yahoo! is probably not your best option.

References:

1. http://webmsi.free.fr/HEC-MSI-0705W-GR8/nouvellepage1.htm
2. http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-1qCkw2Ehaak.hdNZkEAzDrpa4Q–?cq=1&p=49226&l=2151&u=2175&mx=2175&lmt=50

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1. Yahoo!Mash Social Network is Closing – Should it Be?
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