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)
i remember hearing reports yahoo was buying tumblr for 50 million.
That idea probably went out the door when they realized they could build a clone for under $1 million.
ya seriously plus i don’t know a lot of people that use it anyway
Wow! Must be awful because Tumblr is generally useless.
Meme FAIL!
Can I shoot the guy who made yahoo meme?
Jenkins you’re an idiot if you think Tumblr is useless – it’s a great blogging service with massive adoption happening. I’m really impressed and spend hours a day on it.
Doing what exactly?
meming?
If it’s that useless, it must be annoying to spend $1 million on it!
If Yahoo made a sandwich for McDonald’s it would be called the McFail.
Ya, they have a long way to go.
I don’t get the whole Portuguese thing either. I know there are a number of countries that use a Portuguese variant for their native language but is it really that many people? I guess I can understand not launching in English speaking countries but why not launch in someplace like China or India?
Why can’t they launch it in the US or Europe?
Cuz nobody will use it!!
If US and Europe won’t use it, do you think China and India will use it?
China & India don’t Yahoo.
Yahoo is the fat girl at the prom.
Robert N, you are probably American so that is actually a normal question for an American.
But let me tell one little secret:
Portugal is in Europe!
Hey! Jeff you f******ckin American exorbitant P***sh lunatic asylum. Your quote “I don’t get the whole Portuguese thing either. I know there are a number of countries that use a Portuguese variant for their native language but is it really that many people”? I guess your contribution/comment is based in meaningless and useless insightfulness argument.
What do you mean by Portuguese variant in this instance?
Please note: Portuguese is one of the world’s major languages, ranked 6th according to number of native speakers (between 191 and 230 million). It is the language of about half of South America, even though Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking nation in the Americas. It is also a major lingua franca in Portugal’s former colonial possessions in Africa. It is an official language in nine countries also being co-official with Cantonese Chinese in the Chinese special administrative region of Macau, Tetum in East Timor and Spanish and French in Equatorial Guinea. There are sizeable communities of Portuguese speakers in various regions of North America, notably in the United States (New Jersey, New England, California and south Florida) and in Ontario, Canada.
Jeff, I confess I don’t get Yahoo Meme, but the thing is that Brazilians are early adopters, specially when we talk about social apps.
Brazilians used Orkut long before people talked about social networks in the US, it was one of the first countries to massively use Fotolog (sold to Google) and I’ve heard it’s one of the fastest growing communities in Twitter (I might be wrong on that).
I think that has a great appeal to Yahoo and it should have on other American entrepreneurs… if they could only expand their field of view a bit…
I guess people hate yahoo much more than anything else. In my opinion meme is a good approach and if it could be evolved in better fashion then yahoo can provide people a new source of addiction.
I said it before and I’ll say it again. Anything with “meme” in its named is doomed to failure.
In French “meme” is the redneck word for “granny”. Nothing with “meme” in its name will ever be fashionable in a French speaking country.
zecco has since updated their logo: zecco.com but its still pretty funny that meme is essentially ripped off: http://www.scom...topbar_logo.jpg
What are you talking about. The meme is flipped…totally original
Why is Yahoo even still releasing free services? Has nobody there realised that they’d better start earning some revenue from profitable products sometime before the end of the century?
As I understand it Meme was developed by a Yahoo group in Brazil that was given some autonomy to develop products for their own market. I don’t think there’s any grand plan here.
Yahoo following this:
If u always do good things u’ll be ignored… do one wrong thing u’ll get attention! do many wrong things u’ll become famous!
Robin Wauters, how much google pays you ?
2 cents
Jajajajaja, 2 cents is much para Him, really Robin Wauters stinks …..