lifebsideben

Yahoo 360°, the social networking product to compete with Friendster and Orkut et al., will be going to public beta shortly. I’ve been playing with it for a while and although it still has some rough edges, it’s definitely getting there. The integration of social networking software with the rest of Yahoo’s network (photos, IM, Y!local, etc.) is pretty powerful. The problem with Friendster and the rest, to me, has always been that I have little reason to visit their sites once the novelty wears off. The tribe.net model seemed interesting, with the craigslist-style recommendation engine hooked in, and 360 has a simplistic version of that as well. But being able to leverage the pre-existing network of all your other friends with @yahoo.com email addresses, and as 360 starts being more deeply integrated into other parts of Yahoo, is the key. It’s totally possible in my mind that Yahoo will succeed here where essentially everyone else, has failed.

Another interesting piece is the prominence of the blog, front and center, in the interface. This could really be the way to get more folks blogging, within a meaningful context–their profile page. The blog-centric features are pretty minimal, especially compared to something like WordPress 1.5, but it’s free, doesn’t require any setup or webspace, and for most folks, easy is more important than feature-laden. And hey, it’s only 1.0 “beta”.

Assuming these things don’t change when the beta goes live… my page