Yep, just as here. Only now, its for the reasons which I’ve left a great deal of Livejournal communities for, as well as other reasons, namely these:
1) Yahoo can’t seem to make up its mind as far as its social networking is concerned. It’s obviously aiming for a Myspace-like reworking of its SocNet services, as evidenced by its separate searches for books, music, movies, reviews, location, and general interests. However, as its 360 service also provides for the option of displaying which Yahoo Groups to which you belong, one will run into a snag: Yahoo Groups is exclusively based upon Yahoo’s EMAIL service, thus rendering Yahoo Groups a throwback from a fast-disappearing remnant of the Internet’s earlier history: mailing lists.
Furthermore, I received my first two spam messages through Yahoo 360 last month (um, yippee?). Obviously, as we are dealing with a service-in-transition that already possesses an *extremely*-strong following outside of the US (note: remember the 409 clique in Nigeria? the mail-order brides from the former Eastern bloc? yeah, its THAT serious), this kind of thing is only going to get worse.
At some point in the *very* near future, Yahoo must choose between its webmail and its just-begun venture into social networking (or, as I may be allowed to call it, “MySpacing”). Their groups service will have to be integrated into 360 at some point (which will thus uproot Groups from the email/webmail base by default), although I doubt that there is a need to phase out their email service altogether as of yet. Otherwise, Yahoo, in its entirety, will continue to retain its tactless, pretentious reputation (at least as far as its North American users are concerned).
2) Yahoo’s Groups search….AGAIN I say “360”.
3) My inbox is too full of shit (in the half-literal sense of the term).
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More about webmail:
Google, with the launch of its portal service (y’know, Groups, Email/Webmail, and Blogspot), came into a dying business *way* too late.
Webmail has been decreasing in importance with the advent of XML, OPML, RSS and Atom. All of a sudden, now people can view the latest postings without needing an “inbox” to clean out every 6 months or so. So why the need for mailing groups or lists, save for personal, exclusive reasons only?
Eventually, they’ll find a new use for it, but mailing lists are being rendered less and less viable of an option for mass communication, in comparison to the communities/groups on LJ, Myspace, and Orkut, among others.
Someday, it’ll all make sense…..
More in another post, peace out.
