Yahoo! shuts! failed! social! networking! site!!
Never! out! of! beta!
Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything
Yahoo! is shutting its unloved social networking site, Yahoo! 360, next month.
The closure follows the shuttering of services Y! 360 aimed at college graduates and Mash, two other networking efforts opened in 2007 and then quietly closed. Yahoo! believes its family of services already provides social networking functions, but the company has singularly failed to deal with the success of the likes of Facebook.
An update page on the site, said: "Today, we’re able to firmly say that on July 13, 2009 Yahoo! 360° will be closing down and you’ll be asked to move into your new profile on Yahoo!, by July 12, 2009." This means that users will need to get cracking moving blog and other content across.
Yahoo said it will help users to either move their content to another blogging service or to Yahoo!'s profile. Yahoo! wants to use members' user profiles as the basis for social networking type services across its various sites.
The blog also asks the obvious question: "First you shut down Mash, now you shut down 360 — why should I give profiles a shot?". We're told Yahoo! is listening to these worries.
Yahoo!'s profiles don't currently have all the functions of 360, but will get improved over time.
The whole post is here. ®
COMMENTS
Yahoo screws up again?
Why am I not surprised? When they bought Flickr, they decided to kill their own Yahoo Photos and not give a direct migration path for those who actually used Yahoo Photos other than "move 'em all by yourself.
Recently, they wiped away every single frickin' profile for their "new profile", which combined with a weird login error with the BlackBerry Yahoo Messenger client, made me believe someone had 0wned my acct. Nope, it was only Yahoo being stupid.
Now they're killing 360, which means that whatever profiles survived the wipe (because they had migrated to 360) are also getting wiped. Stupid!
Oh, and as they're killing Geocities too, where am I going to host any kind of page with Yahoo???
@Christopher Rogers
Ballmer is Google obsessed.
Some while ago MS search + Yahoo searh would have been bigger than Google search so Ballmer would have liked to buy Yahoo to be bigger than Google.
It made locker-room sense to spend a lot of money to be the biggest boy on the block... if only for a short while.
Google now has >60% of search and MS + everyone else would still be smaller than Google.
It makes no sense, locker room or otherwise, to spend up large and still be smaller and shrinking.
Therefore yahoo no longer has value to Ballmer.

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