Teach42

Yahoo’s big news is that they have unveiled Yahoo! 360°, sort of like My Yahoo for the Read/Write generation. Thanks to Jeremy Zawodny, I got an invite to check it out. He’s passing them out but he’s getting totally swamped. However, it looks as though people who are in the beta have 100 invites to pass around, so if you want an invite just leave me a comment or drop me an email at teach42@gmail.com.

I’ve started tinkering around with it a bit. It’s basically an overglorified home page. It has easy ways to integrate in Yahoo Photos, to add new information (through a blog), to post lists you’ve made, link to reviews you’ve added to Yahoo Local, to list what Yahoo Groups you’re in, and so on. The more you use the various parts of Yahoo, the more information you have for your 360 homepage already.

The blog engine is simple, but simplies an RSS 2.0 feed which is nice. It has a simple WYSIWYG editor for posting. You have the ability to create a blogroll, but there’s no way to import anything in. To be honest, it’s not really a blogroll, it’s simply a list of links that you can have in a sidebar. It would be nice if it grabbed the sites you subscribe to in My Yahoo and automatically created a blog roll for them. They do have a way to blog on the road though which is nice. You get an email address to send blog entries to from your mobile phone if you want. You can also upload photos to Yahoo Photos and create a moblog that way. I really wish that they had avoided the word ‘blog’ though. I mean, yes it is a blog, but considering that it’s just one small piece of the entire 360 package, I think they would have been better off coming up with a more user friendly name for it. Something that people could immediately associate with that aren’t already members of the blogosphere but do use things like My Yahoo and Yahoo Mail.

Speaking of Yahoo Mail, we come to my first major issue with Yahoo 360. I don’t use my Yahoo Mail account. Well, i do use it, but just for spam and junk. When I want to get a free T shirt at a cubs game by signing up for a credit card, I use my Yahoo email address. However, many people use Yahoo mail as their primary email account. Instead of linking to a person’s current Yahoo email account, Yahoo 360 has a mailbox that only works with other 360 members!! So despite the fact that one of the primary navigation links is “Mailbox”, the only person I can send messages to is Jeremy Zawodny. This makes the mailbox completely useless to me. The last thing I want is another mailbox to check.

Security was obviously a major concern to Yahoo because for every publishable item, you can specify who has permission to see it. Choices range from yourself, to friends, to friends of friends to everyone. The Yahoo photos integration is simple, but pleasant. However, all it really did was make me long for the power that Flickr offers you over your digital photos. It’s such a far superior site for photo sharing, I sincerely hope they integrate it in.

On the whole, I think they’ve done a decent job of making a simple interface for people to create a dynamic home page. It definitely seems like its target audience is people who are online, but aren’t exactly ‘geeks’. Any person who has any technology proficiency is going to be frustrated with how little control you have over the site, but I worry that people who aren’t proficient are going to be confused by some of the terminology and layout. There definitely needs to be significantly more explanations for people who don’t understand the concepts. However, I do have to say that it’s probalby the best way to get started, especially if people are already comfortable with Yahoo.

If you want to give it a whirl, let me know!

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