Yahoo's New Social Networking Foray: Max-Treme?
Well, it looks like Yahoo 360 actually was launched today, albeit just before midnight. Thanks to Jason at Over Queersville for sending us the invite. After a little haggling with the forgotten details of our long-lost Yahoo account (we had to go back a few years in zip codes to get our forgotten password forwarded to us), we are now signed up. By the way, yes, we've already found a bug. Friend of SFist Jess doesn't really look exactly like Jason. Yahoo peeps, click-through for the screenshot. Looks like a cached image from the previous notification email (Env: Mac Mail 1.3.9 on OS X 10.3.8).
So what is Yahoo 360? Think Friendster on steroids. There's a people finder to find other Yahoo 360 users, quick links to send an email or Yahoo IM (no support for other IM clients), a photo sharing thingie (no offense to the Yahoo Photo cats, but it'll be better when it's Flickr-based), a way to post messages to your circle of friends (by Blasting, so it must be totally Max-Treme), it's own mailbox, and a blogging engine. The local reviews thing -- well, we've expressed reservations about that in the past.
We set up our personal preferences, and the social side is very Friendster-ish, with degrees of separation one of the factors in displaying personal and contact info. But you are also allowed to 'categorize' friends, which is nice when you want to keep your work, private and family lives sexclusive (but for the love of God, never let them see that page), which would certainly help out a certain Jonas Luster.
You will be able to add an RSS feed of your choice as your blog, and it will be interesting to see how Yahoo handles it. We like our readers looking at the ads on our site so that we can make a little money for beer. So far, we haven't spotted any ads on 360, but we can imagine they'll make their appearance eventually, and will probably use your personal information on some level to help target them. We haven't looked at the privacy policy or terms of service yet -- although we're sure somebody will, and it may not be pretty. We're also not seeing a lot of integration between 360 and MyYahoo. yet -- being able to share your MyYahoo feeds with friends would seem a logical step. Personals, obviously, would be another natural fit.
Since we don't already use a whole lot of Yahoo services (like Messenger) we're not sure if we're going to start drinking their punch straightaway. But it sure looks tasty. Congrats to Ernie of Little, Yellow, Different and all the hard-working codemonkeys and design freaks who made it through crunch. May your pay, perks and benefits make up for the lost sleep.