Yahoo! 360° Followup

I've had a little more time to play with Yahoo 360 since this post. I covered some of the things they did right in that post (Ability to add custom RSS feeds “coming soon”, ability to blog and share reviews, decent integration with other Yahoo! bits and Flickr integration, music sharing) and I also really like the grainularity in which you can control what others see. Overall I think they did a good job. Here's by feedback, FWIW. It seems they are going after the average, not necessarily technically savvy, Yahoo! user (of which there are about 30 million or so). From what I can tell, they are offering a bit too much for the average user but not enough for the savvy user though. I think they are in danger of being in that middle ground that tends to not be overly useful in the web space. As such, I can't see any main stream bloggers moving to the platform – and as I said I don't think this was Yahoo!'s intent. I'd also like to see more integration on non-Yahoo! bits (think Skype, gaim, even technorati) and the ability to customize things more in general. As it is, unless you are a heavy user of Yahoo! services, 360 is only going to be mildly useful IMHO. Lastly, we've yet to see any of the “social networking” sites take off – even Google's orkut has been fairly stagnant as of late. I think many of the issues that plague the space haven't necessarily been solved here. All that being said, Yahoo! seems to really be listening to users feedback on this one and the thing is beta. Overall I think it has a lot of potential. Nice start Yahoo! – I hope you follow through and continue to improve this. Good luck.
–jeremy