Looking around Yahoo! 360

Like quite a few peo­ple, I got a chance to start play­ing with Yahoo 360° today (thanks Jeremy for the invi­ta­tion). Here’s a quick look at the service.

Solid Inte­gra­tion

The first thing that is appar­ent is that this is more than just a blog­ging pack­age or social net­work one. From the name to the way one’s web page is inte­grated with other parts of Yahoo!, it is clear that this is a longer term play with attempts at integration.

While some inte­gra­tion points are pretty solid (Yahoo! mes­sen­ger, Yahoo! Launch, Yahoo! local, and the Yahoo! photo ser­vice seem well inte­grated), oth­ers are major misses. For exam­ple, why is it that this ser­vice has a dif­fer­ent mail­box than my already exist­ing Yahoo! mail­box? (and does that mean I now need to check mail in two accounts?) Going fur­ther, why are ser­vices like Yahoo pro­file and Geoc­i­ties not inte­grated in this? It seems they would be nat­ural inte­gra­tion point and yet they are nowhere to be seen. Last but not least is the main ques­tion about inte­gra­tion of my.yahoo and “My page” on this ser­vice. There should be another nat­ural point of inte­gra­tion there, shouldn’t there be?

Basic blog­ging

The blog­ging plat­form, though light on fea­tures, seems pretty solid. The author­ing inter­face is clean and unclut­tered and presents a
pub­lic blog that has the most basic of blog fea­tures: entries, perma­link, blogroll, RSS, and com­ments. This is far from earth-shattering and blog­ger still offers a richer expe­ri­ence as a whole but this could be a good starter kit. In a way, it has the same feel as sim­i­lar offer­ings from AOL and MSN so I doubt Yahoo! will unseat Blog­ger with this offering.

Wor­ries about copyrights

More wor­ri­some, how­ever, is the RSS feed. I took a look at it was a bit annoyed by the URL struc­ture for it but that was the least of my wor­ries. When I looked inside is when I made the deci­sion that I would never use the 360 blog for any­thing seri­ous. My rea­son was in the code of the RSS feed where the fol­low­ing appeared:
Copyright 2005, Yahoo!

I looked at this and thought that maybe I had mis­read the
terms of ser­vices when I signed up. So I went to read them again and found the following

8. CONTENT SUBMITTED OR MADE AVAILABLE FOR INCLUSION ON THE SER­VICEYa­hoo! does not claim own­er­ship of Con­tent you sub­mit or make avail­able for inclu­sion on the Service.

How could it be then, that the con­tent of my RSS chan­nel is copy­righted by Yahoo!? I’m not sure but I thing it’s good enough a rea­son to steer clear of using this ser­vice. The ser­vice may offer some inter­est­ing stuff (for exam­ple, closer inspec­tion revealed that moblog­ging is pos­si­ble) but do I really want to give my copy­right to Yahoo! In a world where large media cor­po­ra­tions are try­ing to get more and more con­trol over the con­tent they own, one has to be care­ful about the con­tent they give to those large corporations.

Social Net­work­ing

The social net­work com­po­nent looks like every other social net­works out there. As a late entrant into the game, I don’t know how much play Yahoo! will get out of this as peo­ple get what I would con­sider “social net­work fatigue” which is a dis­ease which symp­toms are very sim­ple: if you’re tired of hav­ing to invite peo­ple to another social net­work, you’re suf­fer­ing from it. I now have accounts on Orkut, LinkedIn, Ryze, Friend­ster and a few oth­ers: what more will Yahoo! offer me and how can I get my con­tact from one of those into the oth­ers eas­ily? What we need is an aggre­ga­tor of social net­works (or an agree­ment between the dif­fer­ent social net­works to work on a com­mon for­mat so that if I have a rela­tion­ship with one per­son on a social net­work, the other social net­work would rec­og­nize that link and not force me to re-invite the per­son). When I have a social rela­tion­ship with a per­son, I do not have to con­tact them every time I use a dif­fer­ent device. It seems that, as social net­works pro­lif­er­ate, the indi­vid­ual value of the con­cept is drop­ping fur­ther and further.