When it's a portal the likes of the soon to be Beta'd Yahoo! 360?
Everyone's
talking about Yahoo! 360. Charlene Li
points out that she's been predicting that "...portals will be the 800 pound gorilla in the social networking space…"
When I was with SBC Internet Services we talked a lot about '800 pound gorillas'. Sturdy beasts.
Is Yahoo! the sturdiest beast of this breed of Internet
portals with its 165 million plus members?
The
press release notes that the invitation-only beta of Yahoo!
360 will include: blogs, photo sharing, instant messaging, "blasts" (a way to share ideas, links, etc.), contact
management, community building, general content sharing, recommendations, and a "My Friends" page.
1. Social networking is perfectly designed for viral marketing, so I'm not sure that the marketing muscle of an 800 pound gorilla makes much difference. (BTW is this gorilla inflation?? I thought it used to be 500 pounds!!)
Right now the market is open-- all of the popular sites are IMHO lame enough to be easily displaced. The 900 pound gorilla of the future will be whoever captures (and holds!) a large enough share to be the Must Have, & becomes the AIM of the genre.
Quality-- & perhaps even more importantly dependability (*cough*friendster*cough*)-- are really where it's at. No 1000 pound gorilla is going to make me use a site I don't like.
<3
Posted at 8:04PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Pope Salmon the Lesser Mungojelly