Did Facebook kill Yahoo 360?

Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang started to answer the question Where does Yahoo! head next? on the Yahoo blog today. The answer is necessarily incomplete, they can't go around telegraphing all of their moves, although it's hard to say who would follow them. Still Yang says that Yahoo's social blogging, friend networking, Web 2.0 ghost town, Yahoo 360 will be transitioning into some new, and apparently undecided upon Yahoo profile which might be Yahoo's reportedly underwhelming, but still invitation only Yahoo Mash.

Never fear, they won't through out your stuff, even if they don't know where they'll be moving it to. According to the Yahoo 360 Blog:

• We will preserve your Yahoo! 360 blog content, profile photo, nickname, and friends lists during and after the transition
• We will provide the right tools to move your blog content;
• We will give you ample notice before this transition begins in early 2008.

What they really don't want right now is to lose any more subscribers. The fact is that they don't know what comes next and they say as much in their own blog. They'll kill whatever makes sense and hopefully come up with something better. If they do come up with something better, we'll all know right away, because despite the popularity of Facebook and others, Yahoo is still a primary launch point for those who aren't completely familiar with the web. If the service is cool, they will hear about it from their friends in Yahoo Groups, or will see it on Yahoo's portal page and dive in headlong. Most Web 2.0 startups hope that they will build a better website and that they will get lucky and eventually be discovered and then build traffic and havee a real business. Yahoo needs no such luck. They simply need to build a better, more novel approach to Facebook and the masses will come easily. No matter that they have had lots of attempts that didn't work, they have the seed audience. What they now need is to get their act together.

Facebook didn't kill Yahoo 360. Yahoo engineered the demise of Yahoo 360 by building and delivering a platform that was more interesting to the advertisers than the users. In the end, not even the advertisers cared.

GrandCentral, still groovy after all these calls...

It is month's later and I still love the GrandCentral phone service. I use my GrandCentral number as my main business number and try to get most people to call that number. The voice mail is fabulous. I can reply to voice mails via email if I choose, and when I am driving down the road, GrandCentral's voice mail acts as a central control, allowing me to return phone calls by pressing only the "2" key on my phone. When the return call completes I am back to my voice mail and can archive the message and move on to the next one. I also like being able to categorize my callers and have their calls routed to my home, cell, and VoIP phones accordingly. I upload my contacts to GrandCentral and assign them to groups, each of which has different priorities for their calls.

Today I thought about the virtues of GrandCentral as I read Mike Arrington's plight at TechCrunch. He found himself in a position today where an idiot attorney was threatening him on the phone. If Arrington had been using GrandCentral and someone had started bugging him, he could have taken that one phone number and marked it as spam, or simply told GrandCentral to start screening all calls from numbers he hadn't marked as contacts. Either way, he would have been only to assign those calls their proper priority with a click or two.

Mike, I'd recommend you go get your GrandCentral number today. Knowing you... you're going to need it.

Previous coverage of GrandCentral is here.

Whoops! It looks like someone else is fed up with Twitter

Twitter not tweeting you like it should? You aren't the only one.
Snipperoo has had enough...

qv: Twitter: Whoops! indeed

The quickest way to achieve Twitter saturation

Just in case you are not getting enough Twitter in your diet, you can now tell Twitter to track a certain word and then send you a copy of any tweet coming in that contains the word. Yikes!

Biz says:

We're really excited about this new feature which allows anyone to
track concepts in real time over SMS or IM. Tell Twitter what words
or phrases you're interested in and you'll receive updates
containing those words the instant anyone Twitters them. One of
the most popular words being tracked by people right now is
"overheard." Send "track overheard" to Twitter to find out why.
(Send "untrack" if you change your mind and "stats" to get a list
of words you track.)

Learn more: http://tinyurl.com/2a4ggh

Sure, ThinkHammer Twitters.

Google buys Jaiku -- you can stop Twittering now.

Jaiku has been snapped up by Google. Here is what Jaiku has to day about it:

Exciting news: Google has bought Jaiku today.

What does that mean? First and foremost, we’re of course continuing to support our existing users. So fear not: your Jaiku phone, the Web site, IM, SMS, and API will continue to work normally.

That said, new user sign-ups have been limited for the time being. The idea here is to enable our team to get right to work with Google’s engineers on delivering a new, better service to you as quickly as we can instead of spending our efforts on optimizing the current back-end. Existing users will still be able to invite their friends, and those who are not yet on Jaiku can send us a request for an invitation to join.

Jaiku is a presence sharing service that shares activity information via the web and mobile phones. I can, for example using SMS, a web app on my Blackberry, or the Jaiku website.

What I have liked about Jaiku is that they expanded the platform with features like replies pretty early on. They also allow you to dress up your messages with icons, and have allowed you to aggregate other feeds so people could basically stay in touch with you. Jaiku is flexible and offers more features for more types of users without actually cluttering up the interface or impeding usability. That's a bit of elegance that seems to have eluded Twitter. Just this week I was enjoying Jaiku and at the same time wondering how they intended to make money with it. My curiosity was borne out of the fact that I like the service and was afraid it might go away if they didn't come up with a revenue stream. The Google purchase lets me know that they figured out how to make money and that both parties intend for the service to last longer than a fad.

Facebook is napping

It looks like Facebook is taking a nap:



Does this mean that at this moment, and perhaps for some hours, that nobody has been logged on to Facebook? It's not even 7 AM EST as I write this, so the outage was, in my way of thinking, overnight. If Facebook had been unavailable during the work day, then the nations' economists would have probably seen a noticeable jump in America's productivity.