Did Yahoo 360 get terminated because everybody has Facebook?

[>Snoopy<]

[Harry O]

360 was killed by Yahoo because they wanted to force us into the profile page, then sell our data to 3rd party developers. Greed, pure and simple.

[Kee]

Everybody doesn't have a Facebook account, but many people do use other social-networking services outside of Yahoo's offerings. For example, MySpace was a first entrant into the market around the time Yahoo! 360 started, so that company already had a significant amount of market share. Thus, Yahoo! 360 and similar services needed to catch up. Some companies - like Facebook - did that better than Yahoo!

Competition, bugs, and centralization were the basis for Yahoo! 360 closing. Yahoo! 360's system would have needed to be more flexible to compete with other social networking services. Also, Yahoo! 360 is a beta service so its continued existence was always a shaky proposition as it never moved out of the beta phase. There were a ridiculous amount of glitches with various modules (see http://profiles.yahoo.com/blog/QQCWILCFF...2QToOEoZSg ). Yahoo had a different challenge than other services as it not only did social networking, but it also tried to connect Y!360 with other Yahoo services (like Yahoo! Groups, Flickr, etc.). The connectivity wasn't done well for the most part.

So, Yahoo has developed a "universal profile" for users, making a "social-networking" connection via many of its services (not just focused through one service like with Yahoo! 360). The Yahoo! Profile (http://profiles.yahoo.com ) is a centralized hub, but it is not the "new 360". They haven't been trying to make a new and improved 360, meaning a direct replacement for 360 was not part of the plan. The Yahoo! Profile is really an upgraded version of the old Yahoo! Members Profile. Some features from Yahoo! 360 aren't included; some may be expanded; and some are totally different.

Product usability, market standing, click-through rates, retention rates, and other aspects are key to keeping an online service viable. Much of how Yahoo earns a profit has been through advertising revenue. They are trying to generate more ad revenue through connections with third-party developers, which is a key aspect of the Yahoo! Profile and other changes. See the links below for more insight into Yahoo's fairly new "Open Strategy" direction and what top Yahoo officials thought about Yahoo! 360. It's pretty obvious that the Yahoo! executives did not think Yahoo! 360 was "successful":
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-10041155-80.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10067445-2.html
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives...the_1.html
http://ycorpblog.com/2008/10/16/your-soc...trol-panel
http://www.yprofileblog.com/