Why did Yahoo! get rid of the old 360?

[Bradley P]

Lots of reasons, but what it boiled down to was:

--Yahoo! never did get the 360 system out of *beta test*. They never actually saw fit to finish coding or programming the whole thing, and then they got "frustrated" and wondered why people kept on complaining them over the thing's having glitches that never *Ever* got fixed. And...

--Way too many people were abusing the hell out of the Terms of Service of the system, mainly because Yahoo! was never 100% *clear* as to what the ToS was and what it applied to. So folks felt they could get away with anything and everything: cyberbullying, multiple accounts, and *Lots* of accounts "taken over" by cellphone ringtone spammers. And also....

--Y! 360 was actually overkill for most intents and purposes. It tried too hard to replace the Original Profiles system with a Weblog-based system that was like LiveJournal only easier (and much *much* less reliable). In short: there were too many options, too many choices, especially for people who just wanted a basic Yahoo! Profile and did *not* have the time and energy to invest in a journal or weblog.

And yes, there's no Question, Yahoo! Inc.'s answer to 360 was *also* complete and major overkill *The Other Way*, giving people NO choices and NO options and basically forcing everyone to use a really stripped-down, zero-privacy, Mock Twitter option. The New Profiles system sucks even harder than what Y! 360 ever did.

But. If you look at the track record of Yahoo! and the way it runs its Services, on average, it does this: lurching mindlessly from one stupid bad decision to another because its people at Yahoo! Inc. just cannot *Ever* be bothered to actually run and manage any sort of complex service for any real, meaningful length of time. For real. Their whole business model is Bait and Switch: sell people on the cool "new service", then let the service disintegrate, and ignore and irritate and annoy and abuse the User Base until Yahoo!'s ten-cent rent-a-brains from Pakistan come up with the *next* "something new" to delete and replace the services Yahoo WILL NOT ever fix or make right again.

Seriously. It's a small miracle Yahoo! Messenger even exists still, you know? I'm shocked and awed that they haven't rendered *that* completely FUBAR and useless too.

Just saying.