Yahoo! opens 360 to outside blogging sites: end of blogging strategy for Yahoo?
In what could only be described as either a bold move at interactivity across multiple platforms, or acceptance from Yahoo! that 360 is a failure is a blogging platform, Yahoo! has announced that Yahoo! 360 users can now publish content to their 360 pages from other blogging or bookmarking services.
Interestingly, Yahoo! admits to SiliconBeat that part of the reason is that, basically, they entered the market to late:
Paul Brody, senior director of community products for Yahoo: “Many users have created blogs on LiveJournal or Xanga or elsewhere, and we recognize that,” Brody said. “We want people to be able to have that on 360 and share it with the connections they made on 360.”
Yahoo have also announced that Flickr will be integrated into 360. Whether this affects current Flickr users is unknown.
A little bit ominous about Flickr. Let’s hope Yahoo takes the wider view.
It looks like my buddy Jon on our blog is officially an opinion leader since Yahoo 360 has announced that users can publish to their Yahoo 360 from other services using RSS as well as other alerts. This makes sense for Yahoo to be the one pushing for breaking down the walled garden; after all, they have nothing to lose given they don’t have a social network. And after all, maybe that is part of the company’s strategy: don’t buy a social network because that puts you in the bind of having to protect the walled garden. Instead, move towards what seems like a historical likely scenario, which is exactly what Jon’s blog post talks about here: http://www.minorityrapport.com/2005/07/breaking_out_of.html
The above poster makes a good point about Yahoo not letting content out. Without knowing for certain, it seems that if Yahoo can use RSS to permit publishing from outside sources to its site, then why couldn’t those affected services do the same thing?
On a bigger issue, is this just a step in the direction of letting users pull off their profiles and inputting them into other services? Less reputable companies and fly-by-nighters have tried this and mostly failed, but more because they were too ambitious in their mining of other social networks. If they had stuck to letting users simply transfer their profiles, it may have worked out fine.
Paul Brody is an illiterate. He is heading Yahoo’s! Community related products and he knows literally nothing about it. That product is a complete failure due to their lack of vision.
“or acceptance from Yahoo! that 360 is a failure [as] a blogging platform”
Wow! Looks like someone needs a hug. Or at least an awareness that Y! 360 extends far beyond being a blogging tool. As a blogging tool it is great for the average Joe (hey that’s me!) who doesn’t want frilly, gaudy, overly dangerous options to muck up their pages with. Instead we want the ability to simply, safely, easily maintain a blog. Y! 360 is more in tune with the social networking of nearly every other Y! property such as our Flickr streams, Y! Photo albums, Y! Local reviews, bookmarks (categorized by tags btw), instant messenger relationships, music, and curricula vitae.
And now, we can also share our favorite RSS feeds, which may include blogs we have already started elsewhere but more importantly feeds from netflix queues, Y! My Web, del.ico.us, 43 Things, Upcoming.org, Y! News topics, etc. (including earthquake monitoring stations!).
Really, it’s quite extrordinary!
I think the move is cool, with the company listening to the needs of its customers…this takes them beyond blogging, and provides an opportunity to create an “uber-blogging” platform if they play their cards right.
Its all about aggregating users and content. This creates the user based that social networks are all about. Its a race to get the users… Smart move on Yahoo’s part