Taking Yahoo Meme For A Spin: It's A Mediocre Tumblr Clone

We recently broke the story about Yahoo launching a service in Portuguese dubbed Meme that on the surface seemed to be tilting towards a Twitter-like service. But now that we’ve received an invite code from a user in Brazil Portugal, we know it’s nothing like Twitter at all.

It’s all about micro-sharing, sure, but that’s just about where the comparison ends. Yahoo Meme is much more like micro-blogging service Tumblr than anything else, and it’s a mediocre clone at that.

Here’s how it works: you create an account with your preferred username (Yahoo profile required), and you basically start off with an empty blog that you can fill with text, images, videos, music or a mixture of those media. All you can add to your blog – apart from the content – is a title, a 100-character description and an avatar. You can visit my account here. There are no other settings for customizing your Meme blog, at least for now, and so far there is no way for people to create a comment thread underneath the content you post nor for you to share your posts other than a dedicated URL that points back to the update.

You can search other people’s public accounts and follow them – which is essentially the same as subscribing to a blog’s RSS feed – and once you do this the updates from these users will also appear in your own stream. It’s similar to Tumblr in the sense that there’s a ‘Repost’ button (see second screenshot) that works exactly the same way as the ‘Reblog’ feature that’s baked into Tumblr.

That said, Tumblr gives you way more customization options, lets you update your blog in a variety of ways, offers basic analytics and comes with an API. Yahoo Meme has none of that for now.

It’s unclear whether Yahoo is merely bucket testing this new service in one language only (although it is one that is spoken by more than 200 million people) and planning a more extensive roll-out in the long run, or if this is as far as it goes. We’re also not sure if there are more features on the way, or if it will continue to be as rudimentary as its current incarnation.

Either way, it needs a lot of work before it can appeal to a wider audience than some early testers.

(Thanks to Carlos Duarte for the tip)