When Yahoo! 360 started out I admit I was excited and had high hopes. But Yahoo! 360 never really lived up to it’s potential. I can think of three obvious issues that can be attributed to this failure.

1. It lacked real interactivity
2. It lacked a blog
3. It was full of abandoned accounts

Interactivity is key to social networking. Without it there is no real compelling reason for a person to return to the site. Yahoo! 360 was really great at allowing you to create lists. But once the list was created there just wasn’t a lot to do with it. People want to network together to share thoughts, ideas, photo’s and conversation. They want to know there are others out on the net just like them.

This transitions nicely into our second problem. Yahoo! 360 was missing a blog. Call it whatever you like, for instance facebook calls it Notes, a social site needs to provide a space that you can communicate. When Yahoo! 360 started out all they had were things called blasts (What the hell is a blast?). Later the Yahoo! 360 folks realized their mistake and added a “blog.” I used quotes around blog because it was only a blog in the strictest sense of the term. They limited everything. No Javascript, limited html set. What were they afraid of? And don’t let me get started on the url’s. Here is a good example of a blog url for an individual I am connected with on 360 http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-w6bqHC0ydKLXxL2.7wluWhSZcA–?cq=1. Is this really necessary in this day and age?

Finally we have the issue of abandoned accounts. Yahoo! has a big draw. Lots of people created accounts, generated the obligatory lists, connected to a few friends. Finally realizing there was nothing more to do they abandoned the site never to return. Let me give you an example of why this is an issue. I am a scifi fan. So I want to find other scifi fans to connect with. Yahoo! 360 gives you the ability to search for other people that list interests that match yours. A quick click on a topic from one of my lists provides me with hundreds of matches. The only problem is fewer than 1% have updated their space in months. A simply filter to order the results by last activity date would have resolved the issue. But nothing. Who would wade through hundreds of pages of results to find one or two active people? Certainly not me.

The single biggest item that caused Yahoo! 360 to fail is Yahoo! itself. Simple things could have made the site very worthwhile. I guess in this regard Yahoo! and Google are similar. They both have failed social networks. All is not lost though as you can read from this article, “” at TechCrunch.