Yahoo recently launched a Portuguese language micro-blogging product, Yahoo Meme, that drew similarities to Twitter and Tumblr. And on second glance, it seemed to be a mediocre competitor to Twitter, Tumblr and other micro-sharing services in terms of its offerings and features. And the blogosphere questioned why Yahoo launched the product in Portuguese only.
But now it appears that Yahoo has lofty ambitions for Yahoo Meme, as it has stealthily rolled the micro-blogging service out in Spanish to appeal to the masses. The Spanish language is currently the world’s second most popular language in the world in terms of native speakers (it’s fourth in terms of total speakers).
Here’s how Yahoo Meme works: you create an account and it starts you off with an empty blog that you can fill with text, images, videos, music or a mixture of those things. All you can add to your blog – apart from the content – is a title, a 100-character description and an avatar. You can also create a comment thread underneath the content you post, which was a feature that was missing when we reviewed Yahoo Meme previously.
Like Twitter and Tumblr, you can search other people’s public accounts and follow them, with updates from these users appearing in your stream. You can also ‘Repost’ anyone’s entry, similar to the ‘Reblog’ feature that’s integrated into Tumblr. As we’ve written before, the micro-blogging service seems lacking in its features and its potential to surpass its competitors. But Yahoo aggressively targeted the Portuguese market and is now going after Spanish-speaking population and its 330 million native speakers.
Yahoo also recently launched Yahoo Know Your Mojo, a site that claims to tell you what kind of “social mojo” you possess by analyzing your Tweets, but actually appears to do basically nothing.
Just what we needed…. another Portuguese language micro-blogging product.
Come on Yahoo, you can do better. I am a shareholder
point is it’s in spanish now too. pay attention here sal. loved you in mad men this week though!
LOL … hey .. Im a shareholder too ….. well .. this a good news for us then .. if yaho is doing good .. Good going Yahoo …
Wow!!!!tough,interesting competition between Twitter and Yahoo meme. Benefactors are us!
Good Job. Finally Yahoo quietly invades the blogging market with the support of languages. Eager to here about its next launch? Will it be in Chinese Mandarin, or Japanese to gain to the blogging market??
Weak news today, huh?
They do the upsidedown exclamation marks too. How cute.
Wow, it seems that the competition in the micro-blogging industry is getting tighter and tighter but it is all good.
Yawn…
Great to hear.
shouldnt yahoo be innovating rather than translating?
Yeah, because the translation is done by engineers right!? so they’re busy…
“The Spanish language is currently the world’s second most popular language in the world in terms of native speakers (it’s fourth in terms of total speakers).”
I’m not sure a language is popular just because people are born speaking it, perhaps popular should refer to non-native speakers. ‘World’ used twice.
Who said it was?
“…in terms of native speakers (it’s fourth in terms of total speakers).”
The author said it was. The term should be ‘widely-spoken’.
Popular – liked, admired or enjoyed by many people.
First, I’m brazilian, blogger and alpha tester of Yahoo Meme from the very beggining…
Yahoo didn’t focused first on portuguese for whatever reason. The team behind the conception of Meme is brazilian… so, that’s why.
Meme is growing faster and so the Meme community. Different from Twitter the “memers” are more receptive. Users repost more often then on twitter mantaining the rights to the author, or the first person who posted that.
Sooner or later I’ll quit Twitter and use only Yahoo! Meme…
I’m Brazilian too and I must say: Yahoo Meme is a BIG FAIL! A place for stupid animated gifs and not-so-funny-pictures. it’s like the old Geocities pages. Absolutely pointless.
“The Spanish language is currently the world’s second most popular language in the world”. You guys might want to correct this.
It’s actually kind of cool:
http://meme.yahoo.com/popular/
They’ve opened up a big market by making it available in spanish.
Yeah Victor, do that and stay there with your 3 brazilians friends. Twitter is not the right place for you!
So finally I’m going to micro-blogging in Spanish. Good, I just wonder to whom I’m going to follow there
Nice design, however Twitter will add support for Spanish and squash any hope Yahoo Meme has.
Makes me wonder why Twitter hasn’t done that already. Current language options are English and Japanese.
good going yahoo
Who cares? Twitter, Tumblr, Meme…..are this year’s Second Life. Maybe one of them will still be around next year when the hype is over.
Wait – I’m confused. Are Portuguese and Spanish the same language? I always thought they were different. Google Translate gives the following translation for “I like to comment on blogs”
Portuguese: Eu gosto de comentar em blogs
Spanish:
Me gusta hacer comentarios sobre los blogs
maybe meme is not a good product, but i don’t get it, why everytime i read something here about products that are in some language other english it’s all about critics…
Of course english is the de facto langue on the internet, but gosh tech crunch editors don’t even bother to go around asking if its doing well… is there a rule saying, it’s not in english is an absolute fail, maybe there are not people intelligent enought to use this services outside english speaking
woops not supposed to be reply sorry
Wow, keep up to date man, Spanish is fourth in most spoken languages native. Read up: http://en.wikip...native_speakers
Your data comes from a 1996 Ethnologue report, the one of the linked page is from 2005!
Sorry… you’re right, 2009 edition says as you say:
http://en.wikip...poken_languages
So, I believe Yahoo Meme is doing well, they are actually adding a lot of features since TechCrunch’s first article. Like, RSS, Support for Vimeo videos, Themes, People Search, Top Posts. now the blogs are open as well.
The product is evolving in a pace that is not common for an Yahoo Product.
Do you guys remember how long it took for Twitter to add (buy) Search? I would keep an eye in this product.
In two years time, people will look back at this bizarre phenomenon of “micro blogging” (basically a blog with limits on it – yeah really great when you look at it like that), and wonder what all the fuss was about.