Yahoo!360 is out of the oven

And my first impression is that Y!360 is not bad - at all, very MSN Spaces like, with a cool integration of Yahoo services. A bit challenging to setup though, I have to agree with Dave Winer on this one.

One question now: who is this service targetting, and who is planning to use it ? Is it like MSN Spaces, i.e getting Yahoo and Yahoo SBC users into blogging ? Deploying an alternative service to Blogger (which given the instability of the service nowadays might be feasible) ? Need feed syndication, trackbacks, pings, stats, referral lists, etc. though. Any timeframe for that ?

Here is my 360 home page. And my initial rant feedback on the service, cross-posted from my 360 blog:

It is a bit overwhelming to setup all the elements of the Y!360 account, as I do consider myself quite familiar with all these blogging, SNs, photoblogging capabilities.

  A few things:
- WHY ON EARTH CAN'T I ENTER MORE THAN TWO LINES IN MY PROFILE ? At least tell me how much words or characters I can enter, as opposed to telling me that my text is too long.
- Lots of fields are displayed even if they are empty (like locations for current jobs).
- The caption of pictures should be displayed instead of the filename.
- I want to put links in my profile to point to the companies I worked for, etc.
- Navigation is sometimes confusing because you keep on switching between edit mode and view mode.
- If I put HTML links into apost, I want these to be usable in the "My Page" syndicated view.
- Will be great to import OPML files as opposed to re-enter the blogroll.
- It would be great to be able to do "bulk invites" in the list of people who are already on the service, but I suppose that this would lead to abuse.
- The multi-layered privacy/visibility is great, but I am wondering whether it is bit too complex to grasp for "casual" users.
- I tried to edit this post in HTML (clicking "View HTML Source") and my CPU went 100% for 3 minutes, until I turned the option off. I am using Firefox. Actually this happens in regular Edit Mode as well.
- The integration of multiple Yahoo services is great, but their settings should eventually be accessible through the 360 "portal", at least the basic ones. The navigation from 360 into another service back to 360 needs to be figured out.
- The People search needs to include filters like "people who have joined since you last logged in", like LinkedIn basically.
- The "Beta Feedback" should be implemented as a forum so that we can see what others report, and get information about fixes and changes. I am particularly annoyed that I got an automatic message stating that my feedback would *not* be answered to.

Oh, and it is great that you do not get any email confirming the sign-up of people you have invited. LinkedIn should do the same :-).

Update: And as usual Chris Allen is doing a fantastic job at testing all the features, and finding quite of a few issues. Hopefully the good Yahoo folks will get to read them.

Some more:
- The blog editing panel is too small. Should have a way to increase its size (at least double).
- The moblogging functionality expects blog posts to be sent from an email address phone_number@carrier_url which is too limiting. The usual email validation + secret keyword should be used instead, or as a complement.
- There is a bug in the search functionality where the 3rd (or nth ?) result page can't be displayed ?
- Boy, I want that Outlook address book import , and I want to see who is already in Y!360.

And finally:

1. Allow me to edit a review I have entered (I know it is Yahoo local)
2. The top message bar at the top of My Page is cute, but I should be able to review previous messages (of the day ?)
3. Is there a blog for 360 support, feedback, announcements ?
4. Figuring out who is inviting you is sometimes very tricky if one does not disclose his/her lastname or email address (See Esther's comment).

I am happy to invite people to the service, but here is the catch: like for LinkedIn, we need to have met in the "real world" for me to invite you. Send me an email or leave a comment below if you are interested.

Back to work now. Spent about two four hours on this thing today.

Hey, it sounds like you can get emoticons in TypePad by copying them from Y!360 and pasting them into your post. Must be a feature of the WYSIWYG control that has been turned off. Cool!  These are simply gifs loaded from the Yahoo web site.

Comments

[Steve Wilhelm]

I'd like to give it a try.

[Mike Torres]

Hi Jeff!

"Need feed syndication, trackbacks, pings, stats, referral lists"

The crazy thing is that MSN Spaces actually has all of this :)

There is a bunch of cool stuff in Y! 360. But just a heads-up that when you post a comment on someone's blog, if you are signed into Yahoo (which I always am without knowing it) 360 automatically includes your picture, name, and a link to your blog without any warning/opt-out. So much for being anonymous!

Mike

[Jeff Clavier]

Yep Mike, I guess they had to drop these features from the list of reqs to focus on implementing the SN and the link to other Yahoo props.
And I actually quite the un-anonymous comments, and having a picture there. We have this on Buzznet and I'd love to see it on my blog.