What I think about Yahoo!360°

After hearing so much about Yahoo!360° in recent weeks, I was delighted to receive an invite from Steve Rubel of the Micropersuasion blog (the happy result of an email plea). Thanks Steve!

As many have already prophesied before me: Yahoo!360° isn't so much a blog as it appears to be a social networking tool like Friendster - a Friendster on steroids that is, allowing for a whole plethora of gadget-tweaks to further enhance your profile online. The navigation isn't very intuitive, and takes some getting used to. But from what I can see after twiddling with it for a while, there is plenty of room for expansion.

Bells, whistles aside and more significantly for those who blog behind a pseudonym, Yahoo!360° requires more than a little psychological adjustment. Like I said, it behaves like a fusion of social networking and blogging, and most of us know that there is far more directness with the former. There are a lot of people out there, who love blogging but who would also rather die before anyone finds out who they really are - the reverse is also true. A marriage like this is therefore, very strange. Seeing that Friendster too, launched their Typepad-based blog tool sometime yesterday, the latest turf war would probably shape up the online social networking experience further, rather rapidly.

With services like Hi5, MySpace, LinkedIn and others never quite coming close to threatening Friendster's dominance, it would be interesting to see how big a splash Yahoo!360° makes in the community.

It's early days as yet; the service might also begin to lag as more users jump on the bandwagon. It's always good to start at the front though!