A few weeks ago , we reported that Yahoo quietly launched its microblogging product Yahoo Meme, in Spanish. Yahoo had previously 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.
It looks like Yahoo definitely has lofty ambitions for Yahoo Meme, as it has stealthily rolled the micro-blogging service out in Spanish and now in English to appeal to the masses. 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. But the micro-blogging service seems lacking in its features and its potential to surpass its competitors.
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. Yahoo hasn’t had the greatest luck with social networks recently, with its Indian social network, SpotM, shutting its doors less than a year after its launch.
I give 10:1 to anyone who thinks this will be live for more than 14 months.
Yahoo is again back with it’s Meme not in other EU languages but in standard English. Yahoo definitely has lofty ambitions for Yahoo Meme, as it has stealthily rolled the micro-blogging service out in Spanish and now in English to appeal to the masses. But the services opted in both languages are same because users expect new apps.
We shall wait and see how much potential YahooMeme has to surpass its competitors?
I’d feel very reluctant to start microblogging (Meme-ing?) with a Yahoo service. I mean they just killed their free web hosting service (GeoCities) and their free blogging service (36) THIS YEAR. There’s no reason to believe they’ll treat Meme any better.
Yeah. I’m very weary of any Yahoo service. How can you trust a company that has a reputation of killing services.
If this experiment wanes, chopping block time.
http://www.trad...spx?symbol=yhoo
They shut it down because it failed, so more accurate would be to say
“how can you trust a company that has a reputation for failure?”
Yahoo’s efforts are good but not so effective. Always Yahoo lacks some feature or does only a slow innovation. Actually this leads to the failure.
YahooMeme is good, Yahoo tries to catch up users by native of language. Good idea but how far will it attract is doubtful.
not only they have killed geocities but all the briefcase service has been dislaunched….so pressure will be on Yahoo for this little launch
It would be interesting to see if Twitter can take the lead in the spanish market or if competitors (like Meme or Jisko) can survive with time.
If you look at the settings page on Meme, now it’s possible to select a Theme for your Meme as well.
I give up. Where’s the English version. Looked, looked, see nada.
the image has an extra “h” in front of “http” :(
OK, I see. Way down at the bottom, drop-down to switch to English. But still seems invite/select access only.
Anyone who trusts Yahoo and becomes dependent on any of their non core services is taking a big risk. Even services used for years like Notepad can go bye bye at any time.
It’s kind of weird that you can’t post a Yahoo video on Yahoo Meme (only accepts youtube and vimeo).
This is unrelated, but did anyone notice Y! Mail rolling out a UI change?
Yep, it needs more work.
Get us invites!
Yahoo is the fermented ass cheese found in the crevice of my buttocks after 45minutes on the elliptical trainer and an hour in the sauna.
Mmm, I bet Jerry would clean that out with a spoon.
That should compete well with Wave. *eyeroll*
in poker their is a thing called the gap concept, which basically means you need a stronger hand to call a raise than you do to actually raise. Well maybe the yahoo board should be told about that, because i dont see how they expect to compete with twitter which has however many million users already, by imitating twitter? do they suddenly think all the twitter users will suddenly flock to yahoo meme because its yahoo? is the yahoo brand remotely attractive to anybody anymore? surely if you are going to set up a micro blogging service now, it would have to kick the living sh1t out of twitters offering to even stand a chance?
Gap concept.
This is such a ripoff off of Tumblr. I guess after the couldn’t buy Tumblr back in the day — they decided to create their own.
http://www.inqu...lror-maybe-not/
We’ll see what happens, but then again I only use Yahoo for Fantasy Sports — they still kill it in that respect. :)
It should be very possible for a large company to roll out something that’s (much?) better than twitter. But at this stage Yahoo needs to make sure anything they roll out carries a punch and is not just a soft “me too” product.
As always, My Law:
Anything with “meme” in its name is doomed to failure.
sorry, this is awesome!
I left Yahoo when they rolled out all the crazy advertising on their mail platform. Once the sales guys get ahold of the meme, I am sure they’ll crap it up too. Give ‘em time.
any who wants an invite follow me on twitter or at least send me a message and I will invite you.
I think they should worry about improving other services like Del.icio.us and stop launching stuff like this when there are better platforms for doing microblogging, IMO.
Twitter is lame in all respects. Anyone can copy them.
Here are some screenshots for those interested:
http://su.pr/2XJLwG
Really similar to Pownce and Tumblr.
Meme was designed by Y! Brazil and is aimed at Emerging Markets, hence the early focus on Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish (Latin America). There’s still significant growth potential in these markets, even for a Twitter-like product. Consider the 95% of the world’s population that doesn’t live in the U.S. (or Silicon Valley) once in a while, guys.
Agree. I c meme is getting more popular in China now after many Chinese microblog websites are closed. Talking about its population…
Yahoo has to try harder than this to join the elite Meme club.
Actually with inline video, inline photos and built in retweet it is a lot more fun than twitter.
i couldn’t understand about it because when i want open me yahoo id then couldn’t open it.
Not just SpotM in India, Yahoo also has a micro-blogging product in Hong Kong called “JAM”. The UI looks more interesting. The link has been removed from Yahoo Hong Kong’s front page, wonder how would its future be?
http://www.tech...oo-jam-jam-what
It seems there are not many active JAM accounts….the one that comes up top on google is a test account!
http://hk.jam.y...AX3GU&tab=3
Not interested. I’ve been using Posterous/Twitter and they are working well for me. Yahoo does have the reputation of squashing things like a bug.
Oi, this is coming down too. I mean, honestly, I think Yahoo should stick to mail. Seriously.
They even took down Briefcase, anybody remember that one?
It’s a good thing they use HelveticNeue-Light as the main font, which is only available on OS X. Of course, it looks sexy as hell on a Mac, but either defaults back to Arial or looks like absolute shit if installed on a PC.
Meme? Sounds more like Me-too…
It will be really interesting to see how this pans out in the long run. They do have the traffic numbers to make it happen.
i likey the looks .. ooo !
Yahoo could give Twitter a run for its money. They have the resources, the traffic, etc. And if they integrated it with their own (sorry, Bing’s) search results, they could drive a lot of search traffci directly to their microblogging. And they could make it easy to share from Yahoo Mail.
They just want to get in on the Twiiter action
Good thing.
I liked the name, look & feel is not bad
i like the look…
Yahoomeme looks quite good but need some publicity.
Looks and feels great but Yahoo is way too late. At least they should try to implement a feature that their competition hasn’t developed already. Then there might be a slight chance of survival.
What’s the point? By the time they agree internally what a good feature looks like, the competition has already launched it … LOL
twitter and others are no doubt nice, but I always wanted to bring in a concept to microblogging !
I hereby post a Review-Request for http://www.emote.in ,
A microblogging service; which is a platform to -
1. Make yourself heard, comment on news, stories and current affair.
2. Share your experiences, memories and events with your friends and family.
3. Connect with different people with similar emotional attributes as yours.
(eg: if attrocities on animals make you sad, connect with others who share the same feeling)
4. Jot-down your experiences. You usually have so many things to say – a constant stream of thoughts, comments and observations running through your head continuously.
5. Last but not the least, has everything (and much more) that twiiter has.
6. A wonderful timeline coming shortly (in few weeks)
Looks really great. Just because it’s Yahoo!, so many haters.
With Y! experience with scale, and world wide markets, they have a better chance to compete with Twitter than anyone.
Whether they should be, that is the question. Remind me again how Twitter is going to make money?
If you want your posts to go from twitter -> meme or meme -> twitter you can use:
http://twitter-meme.com/
(disclaimer, I built it)