back to article Yahoo! shuts! failed! social! networking! site!!

Yahoo! is shutting its unloved social networking site, Yahoo! 360, next month. The closure follows the shuttering of services Y! 360 aimed at college graduates and Mash, two other networking efforts opened in 2007 and then quietly closed. Yahoo! believes its family of services already provides social networking functions, but …

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  1. Aortic Aneurysm

    Shock! Horror!

    I use yahoo quite often, mostly for pool etc. No-one that uses the games bothers to fill out their profiles as it is, 90% of activity in the rooms is bots spamming some cam whore site.

    Bring back the days of circa 2000-2003/4 when yahoo was good for pool.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Never heard of it

    Was anybody actually registered?

    I had never heard of it before. What is it with Yahoo! and having masses of useless tools. It has a strong fanbase. But once that dies it will go kaput.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And so..

    Nothing of value was lost.

  4. tiggertaebo
    Coat

    Yahoo! had social networking?

    Really? In other "news" I had a cereal bar for breakfast this morning, I imaging a similar number of people will care about both events

  5. Ian Davies
    Paris Hilton

    They're dead

    Clearly no-one at Y! has a friggin' clue what they're doing, let alone even the most basic understanding of what people use Y! for. They have persistently failed to get a grip on the bot problem (stupid captcha systems just made it more irritating for real people to use the rooms) and have completely neutered the profile system (pissing off a whole boatload of roleplayers) and now they want people to ditch their Y!360 pages, which were sold as the next big thing, and return to profile pages even though they have a fraction of the functionality?

    Hello? Have they heard of fucking with customer trust, and why it's a Very Bad Thing?

    They're dead.

    That is all.

    Paris, because she's slowly fucking herself into oblivion too.

  6. This post has been deleted by its author

  7. Murray Pearson

    I have a suggestion

    Instead of referring to them as "Y!", refer to them as "Y?"

    Y indeed.....

  8. Chris Lovell
    Stop

    Er...

    Yahoo run/ran a social networking site?

  9. Winkypop Silver badge
    Alert

    I second that - Never heard of it

    Meh?

  10. WhatWasThat?
    Black Helicopters

    Y couldn't they get IT right?

    I cannot believe that they could not, with even 1.5 months, get a script together to copy relevant information from one database to another for all the users.

    What happened to marketing? You should _never_ say "X is going to be closed on Z date." You say "we are upgrading X to be more like what it was before, but actually work on Z date." Then have your army of service and support personnel get everything moved over, seamless to the user.

    Unless... there are too few people left inside the Yahoo! support stables to do the job?

    'Copter, because no one will know who does the actual work.

  11. Christopher Rogers
    Gates Halo

    I wonder...

    ...how long its gonna be before Yahoo implodes and MS pick up the pieces they originally wanted for a song?

    Yahoo should have taken the MS dollar when it was offered and ran like hell.

  12. W

    Just leave Delicious alone.

    There's nowt to replace it, as far as I'm concerned.

    'nuff said.

  13. Franklin
    Thumb Down

    Unpopular?

    Come now, that's a very harsh judgment. Yahoo 360 proved to be *extremely* popular...

    ...with spammers, anyway. who often hosted redirectors to spam sites on Yahoo 360, then spamvertized the redirectors. I've received two such spam emails in the past three hours, in fact, and the day is still young.

  14. Stevie

    Bah!

    Is there any way The Register writers could fall out of love with the once-droll but now older-than-Methuslah gimmick of putting an exclamation mark after every word in a Yahoo-related article subtitle?

    As for Yahoo, I've been a fan of their Groups feature since they were called Clubs. I reckon they are simply the best all-round front-end for an interest group available for free. Mail agregator, image storage, file storage, simple database, calendar, polls (possibly the best way of starting an argument on the web is to make a poll and youcan't do that any easier than in a yahoo group). What's not to like?

    Of course, they suffer from the same maladies that any WWW meeting place does, but there are some easy-to-use features built-in to the web interface to combat some of the most egregious ones.

    It's certainly true that like many other companies they've seen their core business eroded by other, more focussed efforts, and have lost some of their own focus in the all-too common stampede to find a way of mitigating the damage by branching out. 360 had no chance against the slew of already entrenched blog products available. I'm surprised it lasted this long to be honest. Let's hope FLICKR has more legs.

    Now if only they had someone intelligent designing their group front-page template so that logo image sizes could be nice and small if you want, life would be good. Having a tech team that had a clue and/or actually tried using their product before venturing to suggest "answers" to questions (Real Example: "how do I arrange for a small group logo image not to auto expand to a bedsheet?" Real Clueless Response: "Upload smaller images") life would be even better.

    Perhaps a tighter focus on what the company is trying to achieve, what they want to be in the 21st century and so on, is required.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Shame

    and yahoo really should do a redirect from www.yahoo.com to uk.yahoo.com for UK surfers, most people don't know how good that UK page actually is.

  16. Daniel B.
    Flame

    Yahoo screws up again?

    Why am I not surprised? When they bought Flickr, they decided to kill their own Yahoo Photos and not give a direct migration path for those who actually used Yahoo Photos other than "move 'em all by yourself.

    Recently, they wiped away every single frickin' profile for their "new profile", which combined with a weird login error with the BlackBerry Yahoo Messenger client, made me believe someone had 0wned my acct. Nope, it was only Yahoo being stupid.

    Now they're killing 360, which means that whatever profiles survived the wipe (because they had migrated to 360) are also getting wiped. Stupid!

    Oh, and as they're killing Geocities too, where am I going to host any kind of page with Yahoo???

  17. Charles Manning

    @Christopher Rogers

    Ballmer is Google obsessed.

    Some while ago MS search + Yahoo searh would have been bigger than Google search so Ballmer would have liked to buy Yahoo to be bigger than Google.

    It made locker-room sense to spend a lot of money to be the biggest boy on the block... if only for a short while.

    Google now has >60% of search and MS + everyone else would still be smaller than Google.

    It makes no sense, locker room or otherwise, to spend up large and still be smaller and shrinking.

    Therefore yahoo no longer has value to Ballmer.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    @Stevie!

    And! yet! you! put! an! exclamation! mark! in! your! Subject! line! as! well!

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Facebook = one off

    Get over it. Facebook was a one-time success. After Bebo and My Space came 2nd and 3rd why would anyone be mad enough to think there was still gold left in those mines? I've noticed MSN are getting the bug too... but only slightly... possibly the right approach. i.e. we're playing, but not seriously... not unless you want us to anyway. A sort of 'take it or leave it' offering. Yahoo's success will come from being the Google 'alternative' rather than the Facebook 'copy' - if they could produce different results to Google then people will count them as a valid website. Google is great at filling the top 10 list of results with 'would you like to buy + what you searched for' - Yahoo should be capitalising on that weakness and offering listings that bring you information first and advertising second. A single advert on a good website is worth x20-times more than loads of crap adverts on a crap website.

  20. jayeola

    Who? What?

    Oh yeah, Yahoo. Them. Uh...

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