Yahoo 360 – What Really Went Wrong?
Yahoo 360 for those who don’t know, and there are probably quite a lot of you who wouldn’t was an attempt (among many) by Yahoo to carve its space in the social networking niche. The idea was to build a network around search and discovery, so that sites your friends had bookmarked would be highlighted in general search results, and you could use it also as a blog platform. Well now we know why it didn’t work out, the above description can suit a bunch of sites.
In any case, Yahoo had announced last year that it was shutting the service down. Now they have announced it again that they are shutting down the service in July. So essentially they ran the site for another year after it was supposed to close down and then announced they are closing it again. Maybe the guys at Yahoo themselves missed the first announcement.
Yahoo has adopted the shutdown strategy after they got their new CEO in place, and have been on it with some passion. Earlier this year they announced the shut down of Geocities and a few other apps on their platform. And now Yahoo 360 which will officially close on July 13. They even have a count down set on their home page.
So what went wrong with Yahoo 360. Leaving aside their jinx with social networking in general (6 attempts including bids for Bebo and Facebook), we will just focus on 360 in this post.
The core problem with Yahoo 360 stood in its concept itself. It was a platform that basically tried to do everything, and in a way was just trying to push blogging and social networking together looking at the popularity perhaps of blogger and Hi5 and the likes and later Facebook, Wordpress.com etc. It might have been a novel idea then, we are Yahoo we will put these two together because obviously people seem to want it.
But the problem was people were wanting it so much, they wanted to get deeper into it. And that’s why Facebook, Bebo, Wordpress, MT began to succeed. They stood by what they did and went deeper and people loved them. It’s that case of too many cooks which ultimately led to 360 falling down as a concept. Imagine this, Yahoo’s own product Delicious was doing exactly the same in a better way than what 360 could.
It is a valuable lesson in terms of where the web is heading that we can take from this. Go for the niche, because that is where the people are heading and that is where advertising has been heading since some while (which sort of becomes obvious because people are heading so). Which means, if you think you have a bright idea in bringing x and y together on Z then all you will have is just 3 alphabets and not users.
The funny part here is that Yahoo 360 is still a beta product. It is actually a good thing because they are just pulling a product which was never really out and all, but somewhere it just ridicules the whole idea of beta on the web these days.
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Yahoo 360 was the first place I ever blogged on. I selected it carefully after going through a couple of options. I was happy with Yahoo services and was hoping that 360 will provide good serives too. That was in 2006. Too bad they have to shut it. It still contains my first-ever three posts. Looking back at them now, they do seem kiddish now[;)]. At times, I like to go and read them and savour the deja vu.
I think trying to make it all at once, and failing in even one was what lead to the demise of 360. Looking back, it was a decent product when started, just that they failed to add newer features to it and (more importantly) market it properly. 360 deserved a seperate division in Yahoo. Perhaps ‘360 – from Yahoo’ could have worked better than ‘Yahoo 360′.
Dunno …. the things always look very clear in hindsight. Isn’t it?