Did Facebook kill Yahoo 360?

Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang started to answer the question Where does Yahoo! head next? on the Yahoo blog today. The answer is necessarily incomplete, they can't go around telegraphing all of their moves, although it's hard to say who would follow them. Still Yang says that Yahoo's social blogging, friend networking, Web 2.0 ghost town, Yahoo 360 will be transitioning into some new, and apparently undecided upon Yahoo profile which might be Yahoo's reportedly underwhelming, but still invitation only Yahoo Mash.

Never fear, they won't through out your stuff, even if they don't know where they'll be moving it to. According to the Yahoo 360 Blog:

• We will preserve your Yahoo! 360 blog content, profile photo, nickname, and friends lists during and after the transition
• We will provide the right tools to move your blog content;
• We will give you ample notice before this transition begins in early 2008.

What they really don't want right now is to lose any more subscribers. The fact is that they don't know what comes next and they say as much in their own blog. They'll kill whatever makes sense and hopefully come up with something better. If they do come up with something better, we'll all know right away, because despite the popularity of Facebook and others, Yahoo is still a primary launch point for those who aren't completely familiar with the web. If the service is cool, they will hear about it from their friends in Yahoo Groups, or will see it on Yahoo's portal page and dive in headlong. Most Web 2.0 startups hope that they will build a better website and that they will get lucky and eventually be discovered and then build traffic and havee a real business. Yahoo needs no such luck. They simply need to build a better, more novel approach to Facebook and the masses will come easily. No matter that they have had lots of attempts that didn't work, they have the seed audience. What they now need is to get their act together.

Facebook didn't kill Yahoo 360. Yahoo engineered the demise of Yahoo 360 by building and delivering a platform that was more interesting to the advertisers than the users. In the end, not even the advertisers cared.

Yahoo announces unlimited mail storage

The following announcement came to my Yahoo business mail:

As part of our ongoing effort to improve service for our customers, your Yahoo! Small Business email account now has unlimited email storage. That means you can send and receive as many emails as you need to, even with photos or other attachments, and your inbox will never max out.

This is way overdue.

Yahoo announces unlimited email storage

Yahoo has decided that they can give you unlimited storage for your email -- for free!

I guess this will raise some questions as to why some of us pay for the Yahoo premium services. I have a Yahoo premium email account I pay for as well as I have them host a couple of domains for me. In my own estimation the email works ok. The worst part for them is the part they seem to be best at is the part you don't see. That is, they seem to have very strong spam filtering so what I like is not seeing all of that mess show up in my inbox. They have released a beta version of the email which has a much snappier interface, but I really haven't been won over yet. The new interface is still pretty busy, it certainly requires a lot of your browser and processing power, and it's simply incomplete. A number of buttons in the new layout switch you back to the old interface for the purpose of making adjustments to things like your contacts or settings.

qv: Yahoo! Mail goes to infinity and beyond
via: [TechCrunch]

Podcast - Last minute advice on buying Tech

Phil Yanov and Eric Rodgers with a (nearly) full hour of technology buying advice.

Join us as we

• Get advice on how to get the best deals on electronics when we talk to the Editor at large of Consumer Reports.
• We get a lesson in HD-TV from Chris Hyder at Jeff Lynch Appliance
  
• Play with some cool phones --
  
• the Linksys CIT310 VoIP phone that works with Yahoo messenger
  
• and the LG Chocolate from Verizon Wireless.
  
• Get some advice from Leo Laporte, Chief Twit at Twit.TV, and KFI Tech Guy on how to choose between the Wii, PS3, and X-Box 360.
  

This show first aired December 20, 2006 on Your Day which is carried statewide on South Carolina's public radio network.

Yahoo swallows Bix -- Indigestion to follow?

Online contest and social networking website Bix has announced their intention to be gobbled up by Yahoo. Bix allows members to post contests and then have the community vote on the winners. Contests range from karaoke to poetry, from photography to stand-up comedy. As can be imagined, the range of quality of the submissions is dramatic. While the best stuff seems to be lifted from the usual suspects like YouTube and MySpace where they were previously lifted from the actual copyright holder, there are original photos, poems,and even stand-up comedy routines on the site. In August, when Bix came on as a sponsor to GigaOM, Om Malik ran a $100 contest where the lucky winner was able to post an entry on his GigaOM blog.

Bix has captured one very identifiable slice of Web 2.0 and user generated content and Yahoo decided they would like to own that slice.

Apparently the sale has brought them a boost to traffic, take a look at the Alexa traffic report:




qv: Bix

Google, Yahoo, Micrsoft Agree on sitemaps -- Hmm....

The Press Release starts:

In the first joint and open initiative to improve the Web crawl process for search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft today announced support for Sitemaps 0.90 (www.sitemaps.org), a free and easy way for webmasters to notify search engines about their websites and be indexed more comprehensively and efficiently, resulting in better representation in search indices. For users, Sitemaps enables higher quality, fresher search results. An initiative initially driven by Yahoo! and Google, Sitemaps builds upon the pioneering Sitemaps 0.84, released by Google in June of 2005, which is now being adopted by Yahoo! and Microsoft to offer a single protocol to enhance Web crawling efforts.

Now added to The Infinite List Of ToDos --create sitemaps for my websites.

qv: Sitemaps