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By TaiTran, May 29, 2009 11:58 am

Yahoo! 360 is officially announced to be closed on 13 July 2009.

The impact this movement has:

Users

4 million users worldwide and 2 million Vietnamese users lose what they call “home-base”.

Vietnamese bloggers had long equate “blog = Yahoo! 360“. The closure will change that perception.

Where are they moving to

I have noted down my prediction on Kevin’s blog here.

I have personally moved most of my social graph to Facebook.

Yahoo!

• Yahoo! loses a global product which has been a bulletin board.
• Opportunity for Yahoo! 360plus.
• Yahoo! Profile has won the battle against its siblings.
• Yahoo! Feed looks promising amist.
• Full focus on Yahoo! Open Strategy.

Competitors

The global forces: Facebook is climbing Alexa Vietnam rapidly.

Local competitors: good news?

Ecosystems

There are two ecosystems in Vietnam on Yahoo! 360: 360themes and LinkHay feed. They will be heavily affected.

How about you? What impact will the closure have on you?

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By TaiTran, April 6, 2009 11:39 am

Yahoo! is concentrating on their Open Strategy; the focus is good, if they don’t abandon the particles that form a platform.

My metaphor: the Hall of Valhalla and the billboards

Imagine you’re a college student. You’re going to the library. On your way, a billboard is hung just around the corner before you reach the library.You stop for a few seconds to skim around the messages. The billboard is typically normal as in every school and at first it looks somewhat messy; however it is messy in its own order and as you figure through, you’ll know what you need.

Basically there are 2 things:

• It is convenient: on people’s way of achieving something (going to the library)
• It has its own order

There are various billboards like that across the campus. All good ones have the 2 characteristics above.

Now, the authority decides to build a hall where all the billboard is going to reside. The hall is separated from other buildings (library, computer labs, class rooms, sport grounds, common rooms…) for it to be easily managed.

How often will you drop by the hall of billboards? To what extent will the hall add values to your benefits? To what extent will the hall add values to the posters?

The hall will desert. People will scarcely visit. The values will drop.

Now, let’s go back to Yahoo!’s case.

Yahoo!’s Hall of Valhalla Yahoolla

Users are billboard viewers. Developers are billboard posters.

Yahoo! 360 which will be closed was a billboard of contents. Yahoo! Mash which had been closed was a billboard of relationships. Yahoo!’s Open Platform in which Yahoo! Profile centers is the Hall!

Image from Neal Sample & Cody Simms’ presentation

Without particles, how can an open but blank platform attract users and developers? How will Y!OSP add values to users?

Now, extending the boundary a bit further to other services that Y!OSP supports: Twitter, Tumblr, slideshare, StumbleUpon…

Yahoo! is leveraging its greatest user base: Yahoo! Mail. The prospect is that Yahoo! Mail users can manage different services from their Inbox! Additionally, users have their Yahoo! Profiles.

However, how willing are users going to stay in one place to get updated of all these services? If they do, they miss out the most, name it interaction or content, from going directly to the other services.

The Hall that Yahoo! is building will be a grand, titanic, ordered silo. The biggest question is: what will users find in there?

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By TaiTran, February 19, 2009 3:10 pm

Creating a Profile is not the right way.

1. Relationship: People make friends with people, not with an entity (brand, object, product, institute…)
2. There is the limit in the maximum number of people a profile can make friends with: 5000. If they have hit the limit, they won’t make friend with the profile you create
3. When people have too many connections, it becomes sluggish for them to perform actions that require the friend list to load:
   1. Tag photos
   2. Tag videos
   3. Suggest friends
   4. Search friends

Creating a Group is not the optimal way either.

1. There is the limit in the maximum number of groups a profile can join: 200. If they have hit the limit, they won’t join the group you create
2. Relationship: people form groups to get to know one another who share the same interest

Creating a Fan Page is the right way.

1. Relationship: It clearly defines the relationship between the entity (brand, object, product, institute…) with its fans/supporters
2. There is no limit in the maximum number of pages a profile can become fan for, or at least I haven’t hit that cap

In Sum

1. Create real profiles for real staff
2. People love to interact with real people
3. Separate the people-people and subject-fans relationships
4. Be professional on the subject, be slightly personal on the profiles (of real staff)

Addendum

Tagging people in the marketing pitch is a smart move, but don’t overdo it.

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By TaiTran, February 1, 2009 4:31 pm

Introduction

“Yahoo!” almost equals “Internet” in Vietnam.

Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! 360 and Flickr are the four products that lead the market. While Yahoo!’s email market share has slowly been sucked up by Google, all four of them are still dominating. We also talk about Yahoo! 360 Plus and Yahoo! Profile here and there but these 2 shall be covered later.

What’s good about it? The good thing is that the majority of Vietnamese Internet users share the same type of knowledge offered by Yahoo! products.

…which I call Foundation Wisdom.

These might be very obvious and basic. However, I want to list them in a clear manner to reuse them as premise for further brainstorms and discussions.

Foundation Wisdom

1. Free

Just don’t underestimate this point. My director in his fifties was amazed by the fact that there are so many good software for free (he was mentioning Facebook) and my father hadn’t believed in a free thing before I explained how new advertising worked to him.

Now that the younger users (GenY) are used to having things for free.

2. Tolerance to ads

Wow a good thing. They don’t mind seeing ads on their Yahoo! 360 pages or Yahoo! Messenger, so won’t moan about advertisements flying on new sites.

3. Simplicity in achieving a goal

Product makers shouldn’t confuse simplicity in achieving a goal with simplicity in design. We are familiar with praising Google and Apple’s simplicity in design, but what I’m discussing is how simple it is for users to achieve a goal when using your service, especially for the first time.

What is the goal with Yahoo! 360? Write blog entries, read updates, comment, write quick comments. And that’s all. 360 makes it simple for them by offering simple features.

4. Customization

Users love design customization offered in Yahoo! 360 and wishes to see that in any other site.

5. Concepts

Guest book

Users are used to using guest book (or quick comment in 360) as the communication channel.

Confusion: blog and social network

I bet many users are confused between a blogging platform and a social network if they ever care.

Confusion: add friend, follow and subscribe

Many users wouldn’t bother distinguishing “add friend”, “follow” or “subscribe”. 360 offers “add friend” and “subscribe”. 360plus offers “follow” and “subscribe”.

Testimonials

Users are accustomed to writing testimonials for one another. While the initial intention of testimonial is to recommend good attributes of the recommended, many have used this feature to simply express their fondness toward one another.

But nevertheless, they’re familiar with this concept anyway.

Status

Status has always been offered by Yahoo! Messenger. But it takes off with Yahoo! 360 blast. Users don’t only update their status on the blast but utilize it for many short contents: quotes, life philosophy, messages…

It’s a good thing that creativity is encouraged.

Embed

Yahoo! 360 allows media embed and it is a great thing that this rather advanced feature has become known by users.

6. Language

Users are used to a set of languages in Yahoo! products.

i.e. “Quick comment”, not “Wall” or “Scrapbook”. “Testimonial”, not “Recommendation”.

7. Contents

Personal and emotional

Many Vietnamese users use 360 for personal purpose and chiefly write about their emotions and relationships.

Page view

Many write for page views and use page views as the only metric to measure success of contents.

Celebrity gossips

Some of the hottest blogs in Vietnamese attribute to hot news that center celebrity gossips, sex-related topics.

Briefly, how to take advantage of this

1. User education doesn’t have to start from scratch

Make use of their current knowledge. Build your education on that.

You can even set an ego gift for your customers. Make them feel like after using your service, their level of technological insights has been improved. This, firstly, makes them feel good about themselves. Next, imagine your users proudly educate others about a new service and become a guru in their friends’ eyes. This further boosts their satisfaction.

2. Make it simple for users to achieve their goal

Good, no need to throw advanced features to users in the first launch. What needs done is the core feature(s) that bring(s) most values to users.

Rule of thumb: users’ patience toward complexity proportionates to the value of the goal to them.

3. Colorful design and profile layout customization

Colorful design is a must. And being colorful is not mutual exclusive to simplicity.

While customization is not relevant to some types of services such as social news, it’s recommended to provide the ability to customize one’s profile.

4. Language

Exploit the set of language from legacy Yahoo! products.

5. Concepts

Exploit the set of concepts from legacy Yahoo! products. If you have to introduce new concepts, find way to introduce it with the language users are familiar with.

6. Make it personal and emotional

7. Don’t (have to) host contents, but be a platform to spread contents

Good is embed exists. Better is users are familiar with it.

What it means here is that you don’t have to host original contents, but need to build platforms that media can be embedded in and focus on how to allow such contents to be spread on by your service.

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By TaiTran, May 9, 2008 1:05 am

Hi Everyone,I want to share with you some news from Vietnam. Yahoo! unveiled several Vietnam-centric initiatives as part of our Southeast Asia business strategy. One of these initiatives is called 360plus – A new Vietnamese blogging application.This offering provides Yahoo! users in Vietnam with more ways to customize their blogs, connect to friends and share their experiences with their social connections.

Just to be clear, the 360plus product is specific to the Vietnamese market and it is not the new universal profile that we have mentioned previously in this blog. So, while 360 is transitioning to the new profile for users worldwide, the 360 name will live on in a different product in Vietnam.

On a related note, many of you have asked for an update on the new profile. We are working on an update and will post it to this blog this week.

So, goodbye for now — or as they say in Vietnam, tạm biệt!

Matt Warburton

Yahoo! Community Manager

Source: Yahoo! 360 Product Blog

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Comment: Yahoo! has supported Open ID. It is reasonable to predict that the new product namely Yahoo! Profile to replace 360 will employ Open ID.