Yahoo! Tunes into Blogging and Social Networking

aarthi_r writes "The social networking wars have finally begun, with Yahoo! coming out with it's very own Yahoo! 360, which combines blogging, social networking, music, mobile connectivity, local searches (for restaurants and businesses) as well as photo-sharing. With stiff competition from the early starters like Orkut it will be interesting to see if Yahoo! will succeed." If you want to log in, don't hold your breath- they aren't opening until the end of the month.

2005: Yahoo's Year

"Yahoo is entering social networking with a significant advantage because so many people have already shared their personal information with the company to become registered users. Yahoo also has deep pockets, with $3.5 billion in cash and short-term investments at the end of 2004"

This is why Yahoo is going to have one helluva year this year. They're taking all the good ideas Google ever had and generating their own implementations of them. That's not to say the reverse hasn't happened, or that Yahoo has no original ideas. Yahoo, before the end of summer or perhaps earlier, will match Google toe to toe on all of the following:

Web Developer Kit; APIs to query Yahoo directly

AdSense-like program through Overture, which now bears the Yahoo name

Social network and blogging service as per today's article

Fully independent, spider-based search system

To name a few. Plus, I'm finding Yahoo's spider to be much more responsive to changes than Google, and Yahoo's search results seem timelier lately. MSN is even starting to take some of my attention from Google. It would have been unfathomable for me 1 year ago to say this, but I think Yahoo may tear Google a new one this year, unless Google makes some changes, fast.

Google's responding...

Google's beginning to respond... since Yahoo came out with the Yahoo Publisher Network [yahoo.com] on a limited release, signaling competition, Google's AdSense has changed their TOS to include Direct Deposit of ad revenue to the publisher's account. People have been clamoring for this for quite a time, but in just a few weeks after some competition from Yahoo (the rebraded Overture bits), they moved in to add value to their offering.

Yay competition!

Blogs

Ah, maybe this will explain the sharp increase in bots from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and others hitting my Blog [utah.edu] constantly over the past couple of months. The interesting thing is that the bots somehow have been preferentially scanning my blog over our lab site [utah.edu] which is also hosted on my same workstation.

Typo/Doesn't seem so special

I think that it should be "Yahoo! tunes into...", unless you're actually talking about a service by Yahoo! called Tunes. Obviously, I have too much time on my hands ;o) here are a few sites that agree with me:
Yahoo!s privacy policy [yahoo.com] "Yahoo! takes", "Yahoo! treats", "Yahoo! products and services"...
Their currency converter [yahoo.com] "Neither Yahoo! nor"
Geocities main page [yahoo.com] "Yahoo! member sign-in"

But as for the actual story ;), it looks to me like they've seen how powerful it has been for google, and are pretty much copying them. Will it be successful? I don't think so; why would I want to use this new service by Yahoo! when I can use a more established service by google?
But let's face it, most people don't think that way. Most people will see their other friends' blogs, say "I want one", and click that handy signup button right at the page they're on. And they know it's good, because their friend is using it. IMO, Yahoo! should've bought off another social networking company and taken advantage of an instant userbase.

One more point: At the bottom of the article (you DID read it, didn't you?) it says that it's going to (initially) be invite-based, a la google. Well, IMHO this is a crappy idea. It worked for google because when they have something, it's (usually) fresh, new, and innovated. Plus, they always have the bonus of a fanclub. Yahoo!, on the other hand, does not enjoy such benefits. It doesn't seem any better than what I can get right now without begging for an invite.

Duh

With stiff competition from the early starters like Orkut it will be interesting to see if Yahoo! will succeed.

They want to overcome 'stiff competition' from Orkut? I have a simple solution... Allow people to join the site. This seems pretty obvious, but Orkut apparently hasnt figured it out yet. I am about 10 degrees of seperation from anyone who has ever even heard of Orkut, so they will never get my 'business'.

Re:Duh

Well, when Orkut can solve their teething problems and get their servers up to the load that is coming from S. America and the Middle East, then perhaps they will start allowing more people. I was in one of the first groups of folks to start using Orkut, and at the time it was useful, but it rapidly started going down hill due to all the traffic, noise and garbage which is making it largely useless. I actually have not visited in quite a while.

Moderation is the only thing that has prevented Slashdot from completely going to hell and unless Orkut implements the same type of moderation system, they will become totally hopeless.

Re:Duh

I wonder how well Orkut will do in the long run.

I first tried Orkut when it was the "new hotness"(tm) and it was all good and fun. However, for some reason the novelty wore off rather quickly.

I think it had to do with their by-invitation-only policy. Just like GMail (which I love and still use on a daily basis, by the way), people wanted to use it really bad not because of its' features or out of curiosity but primarily because they couldn't. I guess, in a way, it's akin to a little child who wants something just for the sake of having it. After you have it, you use it for a while and move on to the next new thing.

And I have to admit I haven't logged into my Orkut account for about half a year (and that was only to see for myself what all those "Brazilians take over Orkut" blogs were about). It will be interesting to see where Google goes with this (afterall, it's still in beta and not very tightly integrated into Google's other services, if I'm not mistaken).

Re:Duh

Orkut is pretty much dead. It is without question the least-reliable, worst-maintained, most-ignored beta that Google has ever released. The interface doesn't even have anything to suggest it's a Google property other than the "in association with Google" tag at the bottom, which is non-evil-speak for "a Google employee wrote this, so we own it."

Orkut is a very poor Friendster clone that has had server problems from day one. The only reason why it gets any press is because of the small-print "association with Google."

pfft

Anderson Cooper's gonna pwn yahoo's ass for this one. Pwn it like only the fat kid in dodgeball gets pwned. And why? Because he's got the hair.

Social Networking needs to have a reason...

I've tried out Friendster and Orkut, but couldn't find any compelling reason to keep using them. The only social networking tools I find at all useful are ones based primarily on a specific interest, like Audioscrobbler, or ones that groups have built or, sometimes, that seem to have built themselves out of the raw network using ordinary communication tools like Usenet and bulletin boards.

Trying to artificially develop a network of people whose only interest is that they're members of the same network... I don't know, it just seems silly.

Me Too!

The only social networking service I have found that actually seems worthwhile is LiveJournal - and that's because it's used by my friends to keep me up to date with what's going on with them.

It's of no interest to me to know that RandomBob is two degrees of separation away from me, unless I can then get some idea of who RandomBob is - and being able to go and read his journal and see what kind of person he is.

I've made a few friends in a variety of places, learnt all sorts of things and keep in touch with old friends - it's basically replaced email as the main communication method that my circle of friends uses.

no interest

thefacebook.com has totally taken over this market for most american college kids. as they continue to expand, they're putting a big dent in the viability of these services. I don't think anyone would bother being on orkut + thefacebook when their college educated friends are already networked together. [there is a bit of a class element to this as well.]

Orkut ?

Orkut is a closed network, it is not meant to compete.
And IIRC, it was rendered unusable by Brazilians, no ?

Done

I did this a long time ago with Clinko Music [clinko.com]

It basically turns any song into a chat room. You then can see who has similar songs and tastes (just like friendster)

In fact, last night I stayed up all night to add Movies [clinko.com] Last night.

What should we call the duopoly?

Since Yahoo and Google appear to be encroaching on each others territory now, I guess the only remaining thing to do is to name the duopoly between Yahoo and Google. Windows/Intel has always been called Wintel, for instance.

I prefer Yahoogle, but Goohoo isn't bad either.

Social Networking? Meh.

Social engineering is where the real action is at.

I tell ya I get no respect.

If you want to log in, don't hold your breath- they aren't opening until the end of the month.
Reminds me of my wife. /dangerfield> ba-dum-ching

But will it work outside IE?

Orkut worked fine for me for a few months, but I've not been able to log in with anything but IE for the last 6 months.
Not that I miss it much.

Myspace.

Everybody I know now uses Myspace [myspace.com], mainly because they include actual bands as nodes and have an interface to upload and post mp3s, along with photos, blogging support, event announcements etc. It's a good way to promote and network music/art projects. (and there are a lot of hot chicks on there too!) I haven't logged into Orkut or Friendster in months.

Anyone Seen Imeem.com

http://www.imeem.com/ [imeem.com]
It's an application that's still in Beta - basicallly takes all the communications stuff we use - IM, mail, blogs, groups, forums, galleries file sharing etc etc and rolls it into one all in one application. Remember that /. story about the bounty for adding file sharing to Gaim the theory was that sharing with friends is more likely to be legal than sharing with every user on the internet. Well these guys must've been way ahead of the curve on that one, the file sharing is just good enough to make it interesting to the p2p crowd. I see that some of the employees came from Napster. They also make a big thing about encrypting all the content in the network to protect you - unlike every other IM app.

It should score huge Kudos points here because the developers say that they wrote te whole thing in C# and they're running the servers on Mono.

Re:Anyone Seen Imeem.com

OK I'm one of the imeem developers - the first poster is kinda correct we wrote as much as possible in C# to make it trivially portable. The web servers are still running IIS because we've discovered a number of shortcomings in Mono's ASP.Net implementation. I'm the security guy here and I expressed reservations about running IIS, but in the end there were bugs we just couldn't get around when the time came to deplying the web services.

But! the original is also right the servers that run the actual service - the 'supernodes' - they're running mono on top of linux and I am extremely impressed by how well mono handles it all.

yahoo...

it's very own Yahoo! 360, which combines blogging, social networking, music, mobile connectivity, local searches (for restaurants and businesses) as well as photo-sharing

Yahoo: ME TOO!!!!!111

The social network will be open

The technology for social uses of the network will not belong to a single company - be it Orkut, Yahoo, MS or a startup. It will be built on top of the "lowercase semantic web [tantek.com]" the same way that the old Internet was built on top of the open TCP/IP protocol.

This semantic web is the result of integrating lightweight, distributed metadata "miniformats" like the del.icio.us tagged bookmarks, the blog trackbaks, and other task-specific metadata like FOAF. Since nobody can control an open standard and users can easily flee from a centralized server and adopt rival ones, market forces will guarantee that not a single provider will hold all users' data.

Bullshit Propaganda

when all they purport is feature list and sign-up sheet. Yahoo! just can't find their user's heart without copying Flickr, eBlog, iTune, etc... Give me something original Yahoo!

[e-mail] -> snailmail gateway
[e-mail] -> Fax gateway
[e-mail] -> SMS gateway
[e-mail] -> beeper gateway (myairmail.com)

DistributionLists:
[e-mail] -> Photo gateway via snailmail

Yahoo! could be a real dashboard but for the blinding adcentricity of their developers and UIdesigners.

BBS's?

Except for the Music this sounds like.. back in the day BBS's that had forums, chat rooms, and file sharing. The idea of sharing music (at least where I logged on) hadn't caught up yet, *don't think Mp3 had been invented yet*, but...

sounds like the WorldBBS of yesteryear.

so many social network sites

how many social networking sites do we need?

http://www.friendster.com
http://www.orkut.com
http://www.emode.com
http://www.expats.com
http ://www.tribe.net
http://www.simpatico.com
http:/ /www.christianconnect.com
http://www.catholicconn ect.com
http://www.netrelate.com/
http://www.bud dhistconnect.com
http://web.tickle.com/
http://w ww.jewishconnection.com
http://www.linkedin.com

maybe the next thing someone will come up with is a meta-social-network, so you can have one network of all your other networks!

Implementation

I have participated several Yahoo! groups and have found them wonderful. Unfortunately the chat rooms only work for people using certain versions of Windows, and not for all browsers.

I think for this to take off, Yahoo! will need to start developing for a wider base of operating systems and software.

Disclaimer - I am a long time UNIX, Macintosh, and Linux user

Silence

Those articles don't mention music. Where is the submitter getting that from?

So is this like LiveJournal?

Blogging and social networking. Is it just me, or is Yahoo not moving into Google's space here as much as LiveJournal's? As others have said, Orkut seems pretty dead. Google's Blogger doesn't do social networking as far as I know. Sounds more like LJ to me.

Early starter?

"With stiff competition from the early starters like Orkut"

Orkut has been around for about 16-24 months. There have been many more socail networking sites that were around much longer before them, like friendster.com, which has been around for a few years now. There biggest competitor will be myspace.com which has millions of users, mainly located in the us/canada regions, where orkut seems to be used mainly by people out of north america.

Logging in too often

What's going to keep me away from this site is the same thing that bothers me about all the Yahoo sites: you have to keep logging in.

I work on a bunch of computers at work and at home and Yahoo won't let me stay logged in for more than a few days. Multiply that annoyance by about six computers and it seems that I'm constantly having to enter my password.

Yahoo has decided to make things somewhat safer for those who use public internet terminals but at the expense of most of us who have exclusive use of our machines.

Try the ultimate instead

Tribe.net [tribe.net]... that's all ya need.

360

is it just me or is 360 becoming the new X,i,e, extreme. You know, take something and append X,i,e or extreme on it and make it cool. Between Xbox 360 and yahoo 360 i am beginning to see a trend.

Excellent marketing

Yahoo! coming out with it's very own Yahoo! 360, which combines blogging, social networking, music, mobile connectivity, local searches (for restaurants and businesses) as well as photo-sharing

Just one question: Can't Yahoo! pay for their advertising like everyone else?

Whats the f...point

A bunch of random comments Take Yahoo 360 and multiply it by 1000 and you get Grouper and other private P2P apps. I guess if you want to share a bunch of text and a few photos 360 works. Isn't this just MSN Spaces all over again. Also Yahoo should have used 360 to allow many to many interaction instead of just one to many. Since you have to upload shared files I assume there will be space limitations and they will monitor your files for offensive or illegal content. Yahoo will push it like mad to its massive audience so I am sure there will be many users.

Blogger Survey

Do you blog? There is currently a research survey out that seeks to know "why bloggers blog." The study is being performed by a graduate student at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. The survey takes less than 5 minutes to complete. Thanks for your time. Click Here to take the survey [questionpro.com]

images of this new service

http://v2.decipherinc.com/survey/yahoo/yah04023/ho mepage_03.gif [decipherinc.com]
http://v2.decipherinc.com/survey/yahoo/yah04023/my page_03.gif [decipherinc.com]

i got asked to do the survey about this (link now dead) and i guess i must have been putting the right answers because they gave me access to a beta site so i could do more questionaires on it.

i looked for about 3 seconds, its just like another blog site to me.

Yahoo behind the times again

Looks like they stole the name and idea from Microsoft who has a program that overlays MSN Messenger called 3 degrees that has been around for quite a while

http://www.threedegrees.com/

so...

yTunes, anyone?

Blogging & Social network still in trial mode

There are tons of website for blogging not body knows how to keep making it profitable. Currently, the only one making money based on ads and membership. .. As long as there are traffic keep coming it will doing fine

orkut and brazil

I am a brazilian user, here Orkut is REALLY popular, it appears even on tv, with tv hosters talking about their orkut, but the service is REALLY bad as much as it popularity, the curious thing, is that in orkut nobody posts anything! you just afiliate to a community to say "hey I think like them!" but you dont say anything, its dead of content but full of people. PS: I hate orkut, what a waste of time..!

Google

Google is better poised to pull of a music search -> download option.

When someeone searches for a song it can have a little light blue box appear on top of the results that says "would you like to buy this song?"