Yahoo’s turn to enter Blogging and Social Networking

Yahoo’s turn to enter Blogging and Social Networking

From a pastime for geeks and nerds to one of the biggest fad on the internet, Blogging has caught on BIG TIME. From corporate giants to the kid next door, everyone seems to have a Blog and they are popular. So popular that they are competing with news magazines. Search Engines love them and we love them. Result is that it has become one of the biggest businesses on the net when it comes to offering services along with Web Mail.

It got big when Google entered the fray and bought Blogger.com. Next was the turn of Microsoft to enter the Blogging field with MSN Spaces. Expecting Yahoo! to jump in next was quite a natural reaction. And the latest news circulating around confirms it. Yahoo! has solid plans to enter this already crowded market of blogging services. And they want to enhance it even more with integration with Social Networking services.

They call it Yahoo! 360 and it is scheduled for a public launch at the end of the month. As of now, the company is testing it amongst a small user base of their employees. Reports say that the project has been underway since last year under the codename of ‘Mingle’.

Yahoo! would of course be integrating Yahoo! 360 with other Yahoo! services enabling users to pull content from the Web site’s discussion groups, online photo albums and review sections for their own Blogs hosted on Yahoo!. It would also be integrating Social Networking enabling users to connect with other people having similar interests.

A senior Yahoo! representative said in a statement: “We heard from people that they have a strong desire to stay close to the people who are important to them, but at the same time they didn’t want to feel like they were exposing themselves online.” Now the point is that considering most of the people on the net who would be interested in blogging would already have their own Blogs… How would Yahoo! get them to move from existing solutions to Yahoo! 360?

Personally speaking, I moved from Blogger to a personally hosted blogging solution. MSN Spaces and Yahoo! 360 mean a total deviation from my current blogging platform forcing me to start from scratch. How many users would want to do that? This might decide how successful this initiative from Yahoo! turns out to be.