Randy Farmer invited me to start playing with Yahoo! 360º last evening and I've been accepting and issuing invites on and off all day today. This morning when I began to poke around my new 360º site I suddenly received a preponderance of invitations to chat from people who want to jump onto the Yahoo! 360º Beta. Wow. So far, some things work well and others are somewhat primitive—i.e. posting images in blog posts has a way to go. But, the social vibes are swarming around Yahoo! right now and the 360º team is positive, ready and waiting for input. Have you jumped onto the 360º beta yet? Impressions? ...

I haven't tried out MSN Spaces but am currently dabbling with Yahoo! 360 and liking the 'blast' feature of 360. Edward C. Baig over at USA Today has been kicking the tires on both services and offers a fairly extensive, personal impression of these two services. He says that offerings are: "...Yahoo everything this, MSN everything that…" Anyone using MSN Spaces? Impressions? Baig thinks that MSN Spaces is off to a head start. ...

So we all know that Yahoo 360 is going to allow us to import RSS enabled content, like photos, and music, from non-Yahoo sources by now, yes? According to Paul Brody, director of Yahoo community products, Yahoo has also been listening to the feedback of its beta users, and is busy working on making their blogging environment much more flexible for us. And, they are going to add 'trackback'. Yep. In all, I've found the Yahoo 360 team to be very attentive during this beta test period. For everyone else not on Yahoo 360 yet, not to worry, it will be available to the general public in the next few weeks. Nice. UPDATE: 43 Things won one too for Social Networking of all things! Now how did i miss that?!? [John Ribeiro, IDG News Service] ...

While I am not overly enamoured of Yahoo! 360°'s 'simple-mentation' of the blog, i am playing with it in it's semi-crippled state along with associating flickr photos, technorati tags, and my spring 'haitech haiku'. Simple format, not so tightly integrated yet with things I've been using via Yahoo! for quite some time now—like Messenger, and Groups. I don't actually use Yahoo! Messenger itself but integrate my friends who use AIM, Yahoo!, etc. via Adium—my IM aggregator of choice for the Mac. So of course i want integration between My IM aggregator and Yahoo! 360°. I've been receiving a number of requests to befriend some of my readers here on the social software weblog and to invite them to Yahoo! 360. I have invited a few of my readers with whom I am more familiar, and with whom i have corresponded in the past via comments or tips. Something is not quite right with the 'invite' system on 360° though as the invitations don't seem to be making it ...

I got a promotional email for Yahoo! 360 today. It's called "Top 3 blogging myths put to rest by Yahoo! 360." (Bizarrely and inexplicably, a photo shows an individual in a bunny suit reading a newspaper, but that mystery is not my point.) The promo is meant to encourage Yahoo! 360 member to update their blogs, and reassures its recipients that blogging needn't be time-consuming, publicly viewable (360 users can determine who sees their stuff), or profound. The promo offers topic suggestions, and one of them is, "My boss from Hades." Yoww. Gigantic mistake. As everybody knows, people have gotten fired for blogging about their workplace. Yahoo! 360 is private? Only if you make the correct privacy settings, and there are two important ones: Preventing the page from being addressed with a URL that includes the user's screen name, and selecting a circle of friends who can see the blog within 360. It is all too possible for a 360 user to make a mistake in this department—especially with ...

We got word that Yahoo! 360 had completed a round of feature upgrades, which can be summarized as follows: Favorites: Users can (supposedly) bookmark other users and follow their content changes, without adding them as 360 Friends. This is a good idea, because 360 Friendship is a rather intimate affair in which content is pushed onto one another's screens. You mishgt prefer to visit select individuals when the whim strikes without receiving every new item they post. Highlighted blog entries: On the entry edit screen, clicking a Highlight box puts that message title in the right-hand sidebar of the user's blog. It is a discrete display. Calendar: An archive calendar has been added. New themes: Pet and outdoorsy themes have been added. Personally, I think the abstract themes create the best effect, but Rain Forest is a beautiful design, I must admit. Now—about those Favorites. Something is wrong. I cannot for the life of me ...

Yahoo! has agreed to provide Movable Type as the default blogging solution in its extensive small-business suite of services. The other hand will get washed as parent company Six Apart directs small-business traffic to Yahoo! for a complete ISP/merchant/blogging package. There's nothing new about Web-hosting accounts with Movable Type pre-installed; the Movable Type site has a recommendation page for such services, to which Yahoo! has not been added. When I first glanced at the e-mail press release about this announcement, I expected to read that Yahoo! had acquired Six Apart—that would be an appropriate complement to Google's ownership of Blogger.com. Of course, Yahoo! provides a newbie-friendly blogging experience with Yahoo! 360, which could possibly be interpreted as competition to the much more established (and feature-rich) Blogger. But Six Apart's three platform levels (Movable Type, TypePad, and Live Journal) cover all the bases and could vault Yahoo! into a whole new position ...

At Demo '06 this week, a number of companies presented their Web 2.0 \ Social Networking applications. Yahoo! was there to show off their new Yahoo! Photos application that applies several technologies and features from the Flickr acquisition. Techcrunch has a good article regarding the upcoming changes, along with some screenshots: Ajax interface for Drag and Drop Tagging Smart albums (based on date or ratings) Friends \ Community (presumably using the Yahoo! 360 \  My Web 2.0 features) RSS feeds (coming soon according to the developers) What's really interesting is the scale of the audience, Yahoo! states that 30 million unique users access the current service - that's an awful lot of exposure for these technologies and may provide the catalyst for widespread adoption outside of the typical IT users. ...

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. ...

I received this tip that Sassa is out at Friendster, checked Jeremy Zawodny's blog, and it appears to be solid. Friendster hasn't been on my radar for quite some time now. MySpace, Flickr, del.icio.us, LinkedIn and Yahoo! 360 have been the social networking services in my life lately. Rob Hof over at The Tech Beat also confirms that Scott Sassa leaves Friendster as of June 13, 2005. Wonder what potential means of resuscitation new CEO Taek Kwon might bring to the Friendster scene? ...

One of the big ticket items of the day was the launch of Yahoo Answers, which aims to be every bit the community-powered knowledge base that Google Answers isn't. Both allow you to ask questions, but the latter's queries are answered by pre-screened experts while Yahoo is taking a long-tail, wisdom of crowds approach — any Yahoo member can answer a question, and user ratings determine the "best" of the crop. A reputation system will supposedly weed out the experts from the spammers. I'm all for the experiment and I'm quite curious to see how it turns out. It would be nice to have a general one-stop shop for this kind of collective Q & A, as opposed to tracking down and poking through various subject-specific user forums. Also, this service has promise to capture the more ephemeral day-to-day questions that don't really fit into any of those forums: "What are some good gift ideas for moms?" "How can I learn to breakdance?" (despite popular opinion, I did not submit ...

I was struck by Mary Hodder's take on the Flickr - Yahoo ID issue because I think she does a better job of articulating the emotional attachment aspect than I did: "I was presented with a login screen which had two entry points: one for my Flickr ID and one for my Yahoo ID, with a note underneath the Yahoo entry saying that once I used the Yahoo ID, I would need to always login with the it. This was a bit jarring. I could not go back to my Flickr ID. I love Flickr. I use it everyday. It's my photos, my emotional representation of how I spend time, who my friends are, who I see now and then, what I care about. And they want me to integrate with my Yahoo ID, not something I feel is the least bit cool or fun or that I have emotional attachment to compared to Flickr." When is a login not just a login? When it's also an identity. I'm in the same boat as Mary — I have an emotional attachment to my identity on Flickr, and I have no such corresponding emotional attachment to my Yahoo ID. In ...

Yahoo! email Beta in a handful of countries, excluding the US and most recently including Canada, now includes a number of interesting new features.  (Correction:  I learned in comments below that Yahoo was offering RSS in its email system for US users some time ago.) Drag and drop email organization sounds more AJAXian than GMail!  Perhaps most important, though, is the baked in support for RSS. MyYahoo! has already had huge success in introducing new users to RSS (many of whom don't know that's what they are using - not that that's a real big deal) and I can only presume that YahooMail integration of RSS has even greater potential.  The company's press release describes its leverage of syndication in a way that sounds more sophisticated than the relatively anemic implementation in MyYahoo.  Anyone in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, France or Korea care to comment here on how seriously a Yahoo Mail user can use RSS? ...

This has been brewing for a little while now, and Marc's post prompted me to chime in with an agreement that the best way to go at this point for a Web 2.0 company committed to new openness is to support open identity standards. The issue is in acute focus right now after a recent announcement that all independent Flickr accounts are to be migrated to the Yahoo network next year. Any Flickr members who do not already have Yahoo accounts will be forced to do so in order to continue logging in to their Flickr account. A ton of folks are hopping mad about this. The group Flick Off was started in protest, naming the loss of the small community feel and identity among the top fears, as well as the simple lack of desire to become a member of Yahoo. ...

Yahoo confirmed late last night the acquisition of Upcoming, the collaborative event calendar. They plan to keep the site operating separately from Yahoo's services, but incorporate its event data into its own site — which continues its recent push into the domain of local search. Not terribly surprised they've picked up a calendar, and not suprised it's social calendaring done well — Upcoming to me seems an excellent choice. ...