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.
Article comments
1 - mroblivious1bmf
i've still found yahoo 360's implementation of css and html to be unsatisfactory.
if it wants to be a myspace clone, i say they need to broaden the features.
2 - Joseph Dunphy
Two years later:
We do have some control over colors and fonts, and can use textures for our page backgrounds, though not our text backgrounds. On the other hand, reviews never seem to post. I have a few that I posted a few months ago, still haven't shown up, and support shows no signs of being willing to even listen to the problem report. I ended up linking to my Yahoo local profile from my 360 blog roll and getting an account on Yelp.
It's a long way from perfection, but the annoyances get to be predictable after a while, and one can build one's plans around them.