Well, I managed to get ahold of a Yahoo!360 invite, and so I signed up and checked it out. Here are my first impressions:

The interface is very well designed. It works smoothly in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, and is very clean. In fact, it properly uses CSS and XHTML for it's design. No tables used for layout as far as I could find.

The blogging tool is the centerpiece of the experience, and overall it's pretty nice. The blog entry form is WYSIWYG, which will be a benefit to blogging newbies or others without HTML knowledge. However, there's no spell checker that I could find. I would suggest that Yahoo add one ASAP, so that we'll be spared from posts rife with misspelled words.

I couldn't find any way to customize the "blog" page. So, I have to wonder, are all the Yahoo!360 blogs going to look the same? While I'm sure it makes development easier to not have it completely customizable, I would hope that there would at least be some different prebuilt styles available.

What's really interesting about the seeming lack of customizability in terms of colors, etc. is that the way the "My Page" and subsequent sub-pages are constructed (CSS + XHTML) would lend themselves to easy customization via altering the Style Sheet, and thus Yahoo could offer a tool to help customize. It doesn't have to be super-complex, but since they already offer this (basically) with My Yahoo!, I wonder why it's not included here.

Besides this, you can also create modules on your page that share your Reviews from Yahoo Local, Photo Albums from Yahoo! Photos, Music from Yahoo! Launchcast, and Lists (which are a feature only within Yahoo!360. You can also advertise presence information from Yahoo! Messenger, post a picture of yourself, share what Yahoo Groups you belong to, and advertise your friends (within Yahoo!360) and their respective Yahoo!360 pages.

RSS is not currently present, but Yahoo does have a blurb advertising this feature as "coming soon", not only for the blog but also for the photos and other content. I wonder what features of Flickr we'll see rolled into Yahoo Photos (and thus, into Yahoo!360) in the near future.

All in all, I'd say that Yahoo!360 is a nice tool for whom it's targeted for, that being non-technical users and newbies to blogs, etc. (Much like MSN Spaces target audience). The integration of Yahoo's various services is actually very well done, and the layout of the page you create is very nice.

While I probably won't be a constant user of Yahoo!360, I do see a lot of potential here. I would suggest to Yahoo that they work on the "customizability" of the page style, and add a few niceties like a spell checker to the blogging tool.

For anyone interested, here's my Yahoo!360 site.

For a "version 2.0", I'd like to see integration with Yahoo! Mail, and perhaps even API access to Yahoo!360. With API access, this could become a tool that even techies could love.