Yahoo! 360°

» see 360.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

yahoo 360 launched march 29, 2005 as an invite-only beta and went public on june 24 the same year. it was yahoo's bid for a social network in the post-friendster, pre-facebook moment when myspace was still the answer for most people in america. the product was a yahoo profile page with photos and a blog. it tied into yahoo messenger so your friends saw when you posted.

in the eight launch countries it was not a hit. the us looked at it and stayed on myspace. the uk and france barely used it. yahoo announced in october 2007 that they would stop fixing bugs while they figured out a unified profile system. the product kept running without updates for two more years.

then there was vietnam. yahoo 360 became, by accident, the dominant social network in vietnam from roughly 2007 through the shutdown. local bloggers built whole subcultures on it. a vietnam-specific 360 plus version launched in may 2008 as a kind of life-support transplant. on july 13, 2009 yahoo killed the main service worldwide. the vietnamese version limped along until 2013 before yahoo retired that too.

i had a yahoo id and used yahoo messenger heavily during the 2005-2009 years on ttnet. i never opened a 360 profile. yahoo 360 was not localized for turkey and never had a turkish moment, the way msn messenger and msn spaces did. i learned afterwards how big it had been in vietnam, which is the kind of fact that sits in your head as a reminder that the social internet does not have one map.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

a yahoo profile page that combined a blog with the yahoo messenger presence indicator. you logged in with the same yahoo id you used for mail. the design language was the yahoo 2005 design language, which is to say purple boxes and rounded corners. it sat next to flickr, yahoo mail, and yahoo messenger inside the broader yahoo product family that nobody at yahoo seemed to be coordinating.

~ killed by ~

neglect from inside yahoo. the product was abandoned for updates in late 2007 and never moved to whatever yahoo's "universal profile" was supposed to be. the official replacement, yahoo mash, never shipped publicly. by 2009 yahoo had no social product to migrate users to. they just turned 360 off.

~ vietnam ~

the unexpected story. yahoo 360 became the de facto blogging and social platform in vietnam during the late 2000s. when it shut down in 2009 it was a cultural event in vietnamese internet history. some users migrated to facebook, some to local platforms. a generation of vietnamese bloggers had their entire archive on a server in santa clara, california, and then the server got switched off.

~ the lesson ~

products do not always die where they were built. yahoo 360 launched as a us product, was given up on by its own company before any update cycle, and then quietly turned into a national platform on the other side of the world. yahoo never seemed to know what to do with that. by the time the vietnam team shipped 360 plus, the rest of yahoo had already moved on. the platform got killed by neglect at headquarters even while it was still alive in saigon.

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