Yahoo! 360°
Encyclopedia
Yahoo! 360° was a social networking and personal communication portal operated by Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

 made available in 2005. It enabled users to create personal web sites, share photos from Yahoo! Photos, maintain blogs and lists, create and share a public profile and see which friends are currently online. 360° also featured a 'friends updates' section, under which each friend's latest update was summarized (e.g. blog posts, updated lists or newly shared photos). This service was never officially launched; Yahoo! prematurely stopped developing this service in 2008.

Yahoo! 360° Plus Vietnam is a similar service that is available in Vietnam. This service was launched in 2008 and is still active.

History

Yahoo 360° launched as an invitation-only service on March 29, 2005. After the full launch on June 24, 2005, it became available to any Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

 user over the age of 18 in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

, Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

, Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

 and Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...

.

From September 2006 through September 2007, the US-based web traffic visiting 360° dropped by more than half. The service had a more global appeal than some of its counterparts, but its global visits also saw a significant drop during the same time frame.

On October 16, 2007, Yahoo announced that they would no longer provide support for or perform bug fixes on Yahoo! 360° as they intend to abandon it in early 2008 in favor of a "universal profile" that will be similar to their Yahoo! Mash
Yahoo! Mash
Yahoo! Mash was a social network service launched by Yahoo! during the early part of September 2007, to compete with other social networking sites by offering "mashups" of existing web services on a single-user interface...

 experimental system. They have, however, said, that it will not be replaced with Mash itself.

On May 6, 2008, Yahoo announced that they have several Vietnam-centric initiatives as part of their Southeast Asia business strategies. One of these initiatives were Yahoo! 360° Plus Vietnam, a new Vietnamese blogging application. Subsequently, Yahoo! 360° Plus Vietnam was launched in Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...

 along with other new services for Yahoo! Vietnam such as Yahoo! Music
Yahoo! Music
Yahoo! Music, owned by Yahoo!, is the provider of a variety of music services, including Internet radio, music videos, news, artist information, and original programming...

 (no longer active since 2009). By the end of January 2010, the number of registered users has increased to 1,500,000.

In May 2009, while the service was still in Beta stage of development, Yahoo! announced that Yahoo! 360° service will be officially closed on July 13, 2009 as Yahoo! developers aimed to "focus their efforts on the new profile on Yahoo". Users were given options to move their Yahoo! 360° information and blog to the new profile before this deadline. Yahoo! 360° Plus Vietnam, however, is still active.

Features

Features introduced with 360°:
  • Themes - custom and prebuilt
  • Blogs (with RSS
    RSS (file format)
    RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...

     feeds)
  • Lists - where users may compile interests, favorite movies
    Film
    A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

    , books, and so on
  • Feeds - where users may include RSS feeds for themselves and others from favorite sources
  • Photos - users may share their public photo albums from Flickr.com
  • Blasts - quick posts or ideas that are neither published in the blog
    Blog
    A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

     nor archived
  • Testimonials - "review" and praise individuals
  • Groups - connect to users sharing similar interests
  • Friend Updates - view latest activities from friends
  • Quick Comments - leave short messages on other people's pages
  • LAUNCHcast
    LAUNCHcast
    Yahoo! Music Radio is an Internet radio service offered by CBS Radio through Yahoo! Music. The service, formerly offered by LAUNCH Media, and originally developed by Todd Beaupré and Jeff Boulter, debuted on November 11, 1999, and was purchased by Yahoo! in October, 2001...

     - share music stations and tastes
  • Reviews from Yahoo! Local, Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Travel and Yahoo! Games

Integration with Yahoo! Messenger

Since v8.0, Yahoo! Messenger
Yahoo! Messenger
Yahoo! Messenger is an advertisement-supported instant messaging client and associated protocol provided by Yahoo!...

 built in features that allowed users to view 360° page, update blasts, post blog entries and view friend updates from within Messenger. This integration allowed Messenger users to view their contacts' pages and alerted users when their contacts' updated their page.

Integration with other Yahoo! services

Yahoo! 360° integrated with several Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

 services. These include:
  • Flickr
    Flickr
    Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...

  • LAUNCH
    LAUNCHcast
    Yahoo! Music Radio is an Internet radio service offered by CBS Radio through Yahoo! Music. The service, formerly offered by LAUNCH Media, and originally developed by Todd Beaupré and Jeff Boulter, debuted on November 11, 1999, and was purchased by Yahoo! in October, 2001...

  • Yahoo! Avatars
  • Geocities
    GeoCities
    Yahoo! GeoCities is a web hosting service, currently available only in Japan.GeoCities was originally founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet . In its original form, site users selected a "city" in which to place their web pages...

  • Yahoo! Groups
    Yahoo! Groups
    Yahoo! Groups is one of the world’s largest collections of online discussion boards. The term Groups refers to Internet communication which is a hybrid between an electronic mailing list and a threaded Internet forum, in other words, Group messages can be read and posted by e-mail or on the Group's...

  • Yahoo! Local
  • Yahoo! Shopping
    Yahoo! Shopping
    Yahoo! Shopping is Yahoo's price comparison service.Yahoo uses the Kelkoo price comparison service it acquired in April 2004 to power Yahoo! Shopping in 6 countries.-External links:**...

  • Yahoo! Travel
  • Yahoo! Games
    Yahoo! Games
    Yahoo! Games is the section of the Yahoo! website in which Yahoo! users can play games either with other users or by themselves. The games on the website are typically Java applets or quick Flash games, but there are others which require a download. Many of the games that require a download...


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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