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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.
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.
I Want To Believe
Ah, maybe this will explain the sharp increase in bots from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and others hitting my Blog 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 which is also hosted on my same workstation.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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.]
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I did this a long time ago with Clinko Music
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 Last night.
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.
Everybody I know now uses Myspace, 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.
http://www.imeem.com/ /. 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'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
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.
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?"
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" 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.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Google's beginning to respond... since Yahoo came out with the Yahoo Publisher Network 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!
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
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
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.
My Journal
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.
I think it'll work for yahoo, a lot better than it did for Google.
Yahoo! is a company based more around keeping users on the site, and Google, quite the opposite. Yahoo! has launch to tie in to Geocities to tie into their new AdSense-like program, so they can now build a system like Orkut, and have it be wildly successful.
Plus, I think they already have a wildly established user group; those people who are currently not using LiveJournal or some other alternative, and who are editing static geocities pages to make a blog. Don't count them out; I have a number of friends that still blog this way, and they say they hate it, but they're blogs are established, they have friends that know the URL, and they simply have no incentive to move away from Yahoo!.
I do believe, however, than an invite-based system is foolish. It worked for Gmail because they needed a slowly growing userbase (unlike what you said). They wanted to make sure their servers could take the load as they slowly wrote more software for the Gmail system. Same with Orkut, only their servers are a good deal worse; I've actually had people Instant Message me saying "Oh no, I think I helped crash the Orkut server again".
So don't count this new fangled groupware stuff out. Yahoo's a bit behind in the game, but they're still in the game. Hopefully it'll just force Google to keep innovating and not sit back on their stock cash cow (which they REALLY need to do a 5:1 stock split or something, who the hell's gonna by a $180 dollar stock of a web-based company???).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush