Twitter has produced a vibrant ecosystem of third party applications thanks to the release of its API. If you take a look at Twitter app store oneforty, there are thousands of applications and sites that are using Twitter’s various APIs to build useful and innovative applications. Which is why Yahoo Meme, Yahoo’s microblogging tool that hopes to compete against Twitter and Tumblr, is releasing its own API for third party developer use. The problem: Yahoo Meme doesn’t have many users.
Yahoo is offering Meme’s open API built on top of the YQL (Yahoo Query Language) platform. The API features compliance with OAuth for access to user data. Yahoo meme lets users post their own content (including text, photos, videos, links and more) and repost the content of others with one-click publishing, allows users to follow other Meme users (via one-way connections, no friend authorization is required) and comment on their posts. Meme’s content limits are higher than Twitter’s—the limit is 2,000 characters.
And Yahoo says that they used Meme’s open APIs to build the mobile version of Meme for smartphones. Yahoo also shed some light on where Meme is being used; apparently, Meme is gaining a following in Brazil, China, the Philippines, India and Turkey. Yahoo initially rolled out Meme in Portuguese, then Spanish and then English most recently.
It’s interesting that Yahoo has been relatively quiet about Meme, launching new functionality without much fanfare or press outreach. Perhaps Yahoo wants to see if there is viral usage of Meme before pouring marketing dollars into the product.
But microblogging is definitely catching on and Yahoo seems to be trying to figure out what the right model is. SixApart is also a fairly big player trying to enter the microblogging space with the recent launch of TypePad Motion.
I really don’t like the name Yahoo Meme. It might be that I don’t know how to pronounce meme (mem?) or maybe its just a stupid name.
not as bad as Jaiku. “meme” means go too sleep in spanish. use of these names forever handicap these services.
Our service is way better than meme.
People may say that some parts are similar, but the concept is totally different and new.
Click the link above (Name). Somehow I can’t include any link in the comment.
Your site is just awful.
It’s unclear what it actually is, but I gather that it’s a micro-blogging Q&A?
Which makes it a very, very small subset of what twitter/meme allow?
Good luck.
People at Yahoo! get paid to badly copy market leaders and fail miserably at it?
Have you ever bothered to check Meme out? Yahoo! Meme is how Twitter was supposed to be on day 1 – clean and simple, comments, reposts, and multimedia (photo, audio, video). Given Twitter is down most of the time, Yahoo! Meme has some real chances. Imagine if it gets integrated into Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! homepage? Twitter is in a similar situation to what Digg was when Yahoo! launched Buzz, but the difference is that Meme is better than Twitter and Buzz wasn’t better than Digg. Also, Digg wasn’t having stability issues like Twitter has been.
Meme got allready a 1st post a web site to your page in Meme tool like addThis does with so many services. It’s called MemeThis and it works… I use it a lot.
This was coming….and it has finally come…
Leena, seems you got distracted: “But there has been relatively”
That doesn’t seem to be a complete sentence.
Also how many users does Meme have? You never mention that.
i like the fact that its 2000 characters. that means you dont have to click a shortened url and hope it doesnt go to a site with an exploit, malware, spyware, virus, trojan, etc.
thats why i dont use twitter
2000 chars? it doesn’t even have 2000 users
Yahoo Meme puts twitter to shame. Its sad that Yahoo cannot get a break even with a good product.
The Silicon Valley crowd cannot count higher than 1 – there’s one and only product in their minds per category – Mac, iPhone, Twitter, Facebook, Google. Other products do not deserve any of their respect.
In this case, yes, Yahoo! Meme has borrowed from Twitter (the way Twitter has borrowed from Yahoo! Messenger back then), but Yahoo! is now offering an outstanding product, which is better than the original in many ways.
“Twitter has borrowed from Yahoo! Messenger”
??
Well, not necessarily Yahoo! Messenger (even though it was the most popular messenger back then), but instant messengers in general. That’s one of their source of inspirations according to Jack Dorsey.
the value of a social network is the number of users, not the number of features.
since meme has zero users, its value is zero.
Any site will get users eventually.. Twitter didnt have a million users on the 1st day itself..
Yahoo! Meme has users – just not so many in the US yet as it started in Spanish only, and then, after it proved to have some potential, translations, and APIs got released.
YQL itself is pretty slick, and if they make it easy to deal with Meme programmatically, it might have a good chance at catching on for specific vertical uses. I’m not sure how anyone would ‘beat’ Twitter at this point, though. ‘Average’ users – the kind who use Yahoo – generally don’t ‘get’ Twitter. Early adopters who like to try new things don’t generally use Yahoo services. So… it seems as if there may never be a crossing of early adopters with any Yahoo service, however good it may be.
but why use yql? at its essence, its a closed, single-source cloud hosted programming language. who is going to lean on a proprietary tool that could go *poof* at any minute? if you want to munge web data, just write a python script.
I would suggest you play with both Twitter and Yahoo Meme api before making that comment.
(not associated with Yahoo or Twitter API. Just a developer who played with both API’s).
Site is slick and awesome. I am a user.
so sad. how many of these day-late/dollar-short ripoff products can yahoo churn out? who is going to invest time in this after watching yahoo kill off other social tools like mash and kickstart?
it doesn’t matter if its “better” than twitter…a dozen better-thans came out as soon as twitter became popular. people are on twitter because its twitter, and everyone else is on it. yahoo can’t light up a social network because their userbase is a ghetto…anyone who genuinely wanted to get involved in social networking went to facebook, myspace or twitter ages ago
yahoo actually had a viable social network at one time – yahoo chat. in 2001 it was *the* place to interract with people. but they starved that and shut it off too.
bartz will soon realize what most everyone else figured out a long time ago…yahoo’s userbase is numerous but also worthless.
Do you work for Twitter or Google? Why r u so much against Yahoo!. Learn to appreciate good products..
Whoop dedo, you’ve used up your quota of trolling for a full year. Go try your mindless comments like “meme has zero users” and their “userbase is ghetto” elsewhere. You even conflict yourself, first saying the value of a “network” is “numbers”, than later saying that “yahoo’s userbase is numerous but worthless.” Make up your mind, my friend. You want people to actually believe you right?
Heh, I dunno about what you are saying… better products beat inferior products everyday. See what happens when I do a little word switcheroo and how silly you might have sounded a few years ago:
it doesn’t matter if its “better” than myspace…a dozen better-thans came out as soon as myspace became popular. people are on myspace because its myspace, and everyone else is on it.
RIP MySpace
RIP Twitter someday???
I am a user and I have mixed feelings.
1 – It is ok but it’s focused too much on pictures – those are the main reposts.
2 – Written comunication between users is scarce and only some users use it to that effect.
3 – There’s no way, I believe, to direct message someone or even to reply directly to someone. I mean, sure you can use /username like @username and post a reply, but there’s a big change that user won’t even see that because it won’t appear on his dashboard.
4 – sometimes there’s a post that doesn’t have a lot of reposts but has a huge ammount of comments and because Meme doesn’t show comments count, the post gets mostly ignored.
5 – although the written communication is sometimes scarce, it feels more like a close community than twitter.
Well from the top of my mind these are the main points of my experience with Meme.
Oops, forgot to actually talk about them opening up the API: it’s great, might solve some of the actual problems I have with the service and make the service bloom.
As a developer who is actually about to begin using either the twitter or meme API this is my thought. First Yahoo always has great doc’s for the C# developers of the world, where as twitter forces you to rely on the community or create your own wrappers.
The only thing that gives me pause is how many post have we read about on TechCrunch about Yahoo dropping a product. Will I invest a lot of time in this product and then get an email saying it was dropped? This has happened to me before so I am a little gun shy.
ah… yes, MEMEs. To understand them you should read “Virus of the Mind”.
A meme is considered a transitory inflection into your mind. Consider it a gene, but for cognition.
Memes, being transitory, pass by. A person may be influenced by a meme, but once they act on it, it changes. A meme is not an idea, but perhaps the aril of the seed of an idea. Once planted, the aril dissolves away.
So that would mean that the yahoo meme must change everytime we go to use it… It could collect ideas and information, but they may change.
Perhaps not the best product name one could use.
(P.S. Philosophy and cognitive science help us to understand technology.)