Randy Farmer, head of the Yahoo! Community Projects team, blogs about Yahoo’s new 360 social networking/blogging/etc product.
From the Yahoo Search Blog:
Now, I get to tell you about Yahoo! 360° — a new model for online sharing that’s easy and convenient for everybody.
During my years of online community building, I’ve seen many types of social software emerge: email, chat, instant messaging, forums, groups, multiplayer games, blogs, and twikis (to name a few).
Until now, most social software worked on a shared view, what I’d call a we-centric model, where every participant sees the same information as all the other participants. We all see the same posts on a message board, the same conversation in a chat room. In effect, communications are either public or private.
These days, as we publicly post more of our opinions, photos, and sensitive information on the net, there’s growing concern about spam and other threats to our privacy. And there’s a need for tools to help us manage real-world relationships that are becoming more and more digital. The time is right for me-centric community – a way for you to get the information and connections you want, without giving up control of your information. Yahoo! 360° lets you control not just what you see but what others can see about you.
Unfortunately, the main link to the 360 site gives you this:
You can check out Randy’s site on 360 though…
It’s nice to see Randy working for Yahoo! now, especially in their communities unit. I’ve known Randy back (online, at least) when he was Vice President of Services for Communities.com, a dot-com flameout that owned “The Palace” visual chat software. I spoke to him numerous times on various Palace Chat servers and quite enjoyed his “company” (socializing with him, that is – not necessarily the company for which he worked at the time). We later communicated a couple times by e-mail when he was founder and an officer with State Software, Inc. – an application service provider that went bankrupt in late 2003 or early 2004.
Cheers,
Doug
What a terrible URL for those blogs. For example, here’s the URL to Randy’s blog:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-9lciejI3aafX1stHPoIRNmkmv4EowQ–
Ick! That certainly needs work. But any change now will require tons of redirects to be in place. I don’t like it. (but that opinion is solely based on the URLs)
I agree Scott the URL is impossible. Bloggers default URL is at least passable for a legitimate web presence. I am sadly underwhelmed.
301 redirect is better solution.