Yahoo 360's long goodbye is finally over.

Yahoo 360 has had a strange history. To this day, many otherwise well-informed web surfers have never even heard of the site which was Yahoo's free blogging platform and early foray into social networking. It never became a notable competitor to Blogger or Wordpress or mySpace or Facebook when pageviews alone are considered. However, it attracted a loyal group of users, including many avid bloggers, who tended to think that 360 was a pretty amazing service. Yahoo didn't quite agree and in fact has been plotting the service's demise for the past couple of years -- someone even had the bright idea that all 360 blogs should be merged into Mash (a more "pure" social networking site) in 2008, but ultimately Mash died before 360 did. Just recently, Yahoo announced when exactly 360 would finally pass away: July 13th, 2009 is the date it will finally leave the Internet forever according to the official blog. I doubt anyone is really surprised that Yahoo is killing the service after the Mash fiasco, but many 360 fanatics still held out hope the service could be saved. Those 360ers always been a rather vocal and opinionated bunch of folks; if you don't believe me, just check out the thousands and thousands of comments on the older posts of the official blog. They have the right to be disgruntled considering that Yahoo is taking away a service they loved and replacing it with another service that is only a partial substitute.

While Mash didn't prove to be the successor to 360, Yahoo is now hoping many of its 360 users will move to its revised Yahoo Profiles service, which does allow blogging in much the same sense that mySpace allows blogging. Based on the 360 blogs I've visited over the years, I tend to think many did use 360 as a social networking tool so it is possible Yahoo will hold on to a good chunk of their more social 360 bloggers. Still, though, I think it's a mistake to to consider blogging synonymous with social networking or a subset of social networking. Google would be insane to try to merge Blogger with Orkut even though more social-type features have been added to Blogger of late; posts about international politics, the insurance industry, and Picasso's paintings just don't belong next to your vital stats and relationship status and I doubt that will ever change. While there are a few decent blogs on mySpace that I've come across, they tend to have a journal type feel to them...they're often deeply personal, and just the sort of thing your friends on a social network would want to read because they care about you personally. You probably wouldn't click over to Doug Dingleberry's mySpace profile to read his blog about the history and culture of southern Germany; you just might click there to read about what's happening in Doug's life, though. Obviously, the line between blogging sites and social networking sites is to a large extent cultural, but it is real for many. I predict that those who had the blogger mentality and used 360 just aren't going to like the social networking feel of Profiles.

What I find myself wondering is why a company like Yahoo ultimately couldn't have separate blogging and social networking platforms. I think their reasoning is partly philosophical -- there seems to be a great drive to consolidate at Yahoo and bring diverse services together under one umbrella: "One profile to rule them all" seems to be the motto. You could argue that that might indeed be rather convenient. Beyond that, I think Yahoo's actions betray the position the company increasingly occupies: they are trying to keep up with an Internet that is changing without their influence. They were late to both the blogging and social networking moves and in 2009 they're still trying to get a foothold in those sectors. When the next big trend hits, Yahoo will probably have to revamp Profiles again and start another site or three to try to get a piece of that new sector. Yahoo could be a highly successful copycat if that's all they want to be, but I think they'll need to stand by their projects more and stop dreaming their perfect copy of another's idea is going to be the next big thing. 360, like some other Yahoo sites, didn't really die of natural causes...it was choked to death by management that just didn't believe in it and thought it a failure.