Looks Like it`s Back to the Drawing Board for Yahoo 360 - Suggestions for Improvement
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According to comScore Networks, a web portal that tracks website popularity, the leading blog hosting and authoring service in the United States was blogger.com with 21 million unique visitors. MySpace.com's blogs came in second with 16 million unique visitors. Now clearly, simply measuring unique visits is not a true indicator of who has the best blogging platform, because said measurement is really more of a reflection of what blogs are getting read, as opposed to which tool bloggers like to use when they create their blogs.
Still, it's a good measuring stick, so we'll use it for the purposes of our analysis.
Since the advent of the blogging phenomenon, blogger.com has always been the standard bearer for small publishers. There are a handful of more robust blog publishing interfaces, such as WordPress and TypePad, but for the little guy, blogger.com has always been where it's at.
But believe it or not, even their offering would benefit from a few upgrades. For starters, blogger.com does suffer from intermittent outages and "freezes" which kick publishers out and/or do not allow them to log in and create new entries. In addition, the aforementioned lack of SEO friendliness afforded by the default setup makes blogger.com a very limited application for the serious web publisher that wants to establish a respectable web presence.
However, what blogger.com lacks in terms of SEO features and reliability is made up for by their ability to inform their publishers and refer users to existing blogs. Blogger has features such as "Blogs of Note" and "Recently Published" which alert users to blogs that might be worth reading. Their dashboard also offers "Blogger News" which is extremely attractive to unseasoned publishers looking to improve their craft. Yahoo 360 has a news blog of sorts, which is a sort of a product update vehicle, but this is not what publishers are looking for, in my opinion.
And as for MySpace, their blogging interface, like blogger.com, is extremely basic and is also prone to outages and "freezes" (even more so than Blogger). I know this, because like most people on this earth, I have a MySpace profile and I actually post blogs from time to time (no, I'm not going to share my address with you all). Basically, it's just a title, category, text editing, and a few catchy personalization features such as "Current Mood."
And that's about it.
So I guess the point here is that a blogging interface doesn't have to be very fancy in order to be effective. But it must have an angle of some sort. Blogger's angle is that it was the first true blog interface (something Yahoo will never be able to claim). MySpace's angle is the overwhelming myriad of personalization features (both internal and third-party) and the sheer size of its social networking community.
Yahoo may not be able to match that level of personalization, but what it can do is find ways to convert their existing overall user base (Yahoo is arguably the largest web portal in the world) into bloggers/social networkers.
According to David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo.com, social media is a key focus for their web giant, and blogging is a big part of that, so the company has plans to be a major player in blogging no later than five years from now. That's fine and dandy, but so far, there has been little more than talk and efforts to secure corporate sponsorship for Yahoo 360, as evidenced by this week's launch of a high profile campaign for Nissan and the launching of the first corporate page over at 360.yahoo.com.
Finding big-name advertisers is great for the bottom line, but if Yahoo is serious about becoming a legitimate entity in the blogging and/or social networking arena they will need to come up with a truly original plan for converting existing publishers and enticing new ones to join Yahoo 360. They were late to the party on both fronts, so short of a merger of some sort, a truly revolutionary stride will be required in order for them to rise to the forefront.
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