Yahoo’s 360 Degrees product comes to Canada

Yahoo Canada is hoping its users will find no reason to go anywhere else for their online interaction, and has launched a new communications aggregation effort to try and convince users of the benefits of having all your online networking needs met in one spot. Yahoo 360 Degrees is "a social publishing service that allows people to easily share what matters to them most, and really bring all of the Yahoo pieces together seamlessly...in one central location," says Bryan Lipovetsky, product manager for 360 Degrees at the Toronto-based Canadian operations of Sunnyvale CA’s Yahoo Inc. With a pedigree in community-driven sites – including Yahoo Groups and GeoCities, the collection of personal Web pages Yahoo bought in 1999 – the firm already had many of the pieces necessary to capitalize on the emerging phenomenon of user-generated content and communities on the Internet. After acquiring Flickr in March 2005, Yahoo had the muscle to take on the heavyweights in each of the "social media" categories – blogging, photo and image sharing, commonly-themed groups, reviews, as well as messaging and webmail. "The Yahoo Canada 360 is an evolution of our existing community," Lipovetsky says. "It’s not a traditional blogging service." Nevertheless, there is a strong blogging component to the offering that allows users to create their own weblogs using Yahoo’s preset formats that can be customized with colour schemes and graphic motifs, as well as aggregate and republish content from other non-Yahoo blogs using an RSS 2.0 feed. Yahoo 360 also features animated user avatars, links to the Yahoo Groups a user belongs to, the ability to make custom polls, and "blasts," a messaging option that allows users to post a musing or thought at the top of their page to denote their current mood or state of mind. Every piece of personal content generated through the offering can be customized to be viewable only by designated "friends", friends of those friends, or friends of friends of friends, a feature Lipovetsky says keeps the community feel of Yahoo intact; content can also be set to be viewable by the general Web browsing public at large, or no one but the user his or her self. "You have pretty granular controls," he says. "The choice is really yours." With online merchants such as Amazon.com and consumer opinion sites such as Epinions proving the worth of user-generated criticism and reviews, Yahoo also places great stock in the content generated by users of its services such as Yahoo Music, which boasts more than six billion ratings from users, and Yahoo Local, a geographic-location-specific review service that’s currently not available in Canada. But while Yahoo can rightfully be considered a multinational communications and media giant, 360 Degrees faces stiff competition in similar offerings from Microsoft Corp. – its MSN Spaces social media and blogging service debuted at the start of 2005 – and News Corp., which purchased personal information site phenomenon Myspace.com for US$580 million last summer. As was the case with last month’s launch of the Yahoo Canada Music Unlimited paid download service (CNM, Feb. 17/06), 360 Degrees has been available south of the border since the spring of 2005. "We’re really excited the progress that the US is making with the product – we’ve been definitely learning a lot from them," Lipovetsky says, but adds "the Canadian product is unique" and has been customized for the Canadian market. The service is still in beta testing in this country, "and we’ll continue to evolve the product as we go," he says.

Yahoo’s 360 Degrees product comes to Canada

News | 03/20/2006 5:00 am EST

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