Yahoo To Launch Meme To Fight Down Twitter – Is There A War Plan?
It is sad that Yahoo, which is one of the earliest success stories on the Internet is fighting a slew of property shut downs lately. Yahoo had been an early mover in so many things that are sustaining the internet today. They launched email more than 12 years back and though they have sustained to be a leader today in this segment, other properties have not been so lucky. Geocities could have been today’s Wordpress, Delicious could have been the link sharing service that Twitter is now known for.
Amidst all of this, Yahoo continues to launch new products and the latest in this is Yahoo Meme which was launched in English this week. Yahoo Meme is supposed to be a competitor to Twitter and the outright verdict is that it is doomed for the ‘deadpool’ sooner or later. Why? Simply because the launch has come a tad too late – Twitter is already mainstream, they have over 44 million registered users, and have a zillion apps that makes Twitter all the more useful.
But I still think there is space for one more microblogging service, and Meme can definitely pose a tough challenge, if not beat Twitter at its own game. How? Here are my 2 cents:
Integration -
Yahoo’s strength is in the visitors to the different Yahoo properties – Mail, Messenger besides the portal. Integrate Yahoo Meme to each of these properties. A visitor to Yahoo.com who sees a prominent section that displays ’status messages’ from friends besides a place to update his own text is going to use it every time he visits the site. Similarly integrating Yahoo Messenger status messages with Meme and the same available in a window (like the chat window) on the Yahoo mail is going to go a long way in providing an exposure to the new product.
Twitter Advanced!
It is often said that the success of Twitter lay in its dumbed down site that let individual developers compliment the core fuctionality with new applications. While it goes without saying that an API should be released soon for developers to get going, Meme could also try at inherently providing features that are not inherently available on Twitter but is popular as apps – picture sharing, desktop application,etc. Blish – A Twitter like service from Network 18 comes closest to such a site.
Friends are the key -
There is a reason why people today use both Facebook and Twitter – because there is a need to be logged in at both sites to keep in touch with all your friends. Meme could dilute its product offering here, but if Yahoo is going to let you seamlessly network with your Facebook and Twitter friends(apart from your Meme network, that is) via the Meme interface, the site could find loyal users here.
Focus on a Target Audience -
So, it is being said that tweens and teens don’t tweet much. That’s great news for Yahoo, right? When you think of it, a service like Twitter could have been a craze among the teenagers, but possibly because it first got popular among the techie audience, the teenagers have not taken to the service. Could Yahoo find a niche audience here?
Make Money Microblogging?
Wired.com once made headlines saying blogging is dead since microblogging was in thing. Nothing can be more far away from the truth simply because there is a good section of people who blog with an idea of monetizing it at a later stage. And that is not a small section of people, either. How about a revenue sharing model with the Meme users? Or let them carry their own ads? I understand there are loopholes here since each on of the users are only going to be looking at their own pages, but revenue sharing can be done. It is a great way at incentivizing people to turn to Yahoo Meme.
All said and done, the ball’s definitely in Yahoo’s court to try and focus on gaining traction to this new service. Otherwise, they can always call it quits next year same claiming it was only a social media experiment!
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Hi, Yahoo Meme just released their API through YQL (Yahoo Query Language) Platform.
see here an example: http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/?q=SELECT%20*%20FROM%20meme.popular%20WHERE%20locale%3D%27pt%27
Regards
Here it goes the API example again
http://bit.ly/19SfzD
Thanks for the link Antonio..
Yeah but is it open??
Nope..not yet..
I think yahoo is too late with this service. Infact there’s another indian startup called blogertizeworld.com which has raised money from bloggers by selling pixel adspace to them
They’ve raised over $50k in last one year (source wsj http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124421448828589241.html ) and have recently launched their own micro blogging service called
bwjams.com . Apparently the features of bwjams and meme are quite similar – so i think just like spotm, yahoo is gonna shut meme within a year or so