Yahoo! Meme

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

~ the goodbye ~

yahoo meme never reached turkey at meaningful scale, it was a portuguese first product from yahoo's são paulo office aimed at the latin american corner of the microblog market that twitter was still half-occupying back then. by the time the localization caught up to english, anyway, the english speaking timeline slot had been taken by twitter in 2008. the portuguese slot was being taken by twitter from 2009. yahoo meme sat in the small space between, a side bet inside a company that was already losing the thread of what it was supposed to be.

the product was a tumblr-twitter cross. you posted text or photos or short audio. you reposted other people's posts with a one-click action the company called ressonar in portuguese. either way, the form was a little more permissive than the 140 character limit twitter had at the time, a little less rich than the reblog culture tumblr was running. yahoo brazil built the initial version and the rest of the company localized it into spanish then english then asian markets through 2010 and into 2011.

i was reading american tech blogs at the time and yahoo meme barely surfaced. the launch coverage was thin in english. the reposts from the portuguese press were even thinner. by then twitter was already where the english speaking and turkish speaking internet did its short posts, so a yahoo branded clone with multiple language editions was the kind of product i would skim past on techcrunch without opening the page.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the press cycle in latin america was warmer than the english one. yahoo's brand was still strong in brazil and the portuguese localization was the thing twitter had not done at launch. some of the early growth came from brazilian bloggers and celebrities signing up because the interface was in their language. twitter shipped a portuguese version of its own site in late 2010 and the structural advantage collapsed inside a quarter. yahoo meme never published a public user count that the press could compare against, which on its own is usually a tell.

~ the decline ~

the meme name turned out to be a problem of its own. by 2010 the word had been pulled into mainstream english usage to describe image macros and youtube clips, so the yahoo meme branding kept colliding with search results about lolcats. for some reason the company never renamed the product. the founding brazil team also drifted onto other yahoo projects through 2010 and 2011, leaving the service to coast inside the larger company without a clear product owner.

~ the long tail ~

yahoo shut meme down globally on may 25, 2012, a few weeks before marissa mayer took over as ceo in july. the wind-down was part of a wider sweep that also caught yahoo deals earlier in the year. nothing migrated forward. brazilian and spanish speaking users either moved to twitter or to facebook by that point. the chinese version was small enough that the closure barely registered in the local press. yahoo never tried another microblog after.

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