Yahoo! 360 Closing Shop. How Confident Are You With Your Blogging Service Provider?

By J Angelo RacomaNetworking

Yahoo! has announced that its 360! service will be shutting down by July 12, 2009.

Though 360 gained a strong core of loyal users (you) who enjoyed the service, Yahoo! has been reprioritizing some products to help us deliver the best possible experiences to consumers. The decision to close Yahoo! 360 and transition users to profiles is part of this larger strategy, but we had been waiting until we had an alternative solution that we could offer to our community of Yahoo! 360 users until we officially shut down 360.

This might not exactly be big news to most of the world, but for regions where 360 is the preferred blogging and social networking application of choice, like in Vietnam, this could be cause for concern and headache. Yahoo! will provide a way to migrate blog content to a Yahoo! profile. But of course, it’s not the same thing. The functionality will likely be different. Also, if your blog has already been optimized on the search engines and saved on peoples’ bookmarks and RSS readers, you will definitely lose readership.

This makes me wonder: how sure are you with your service providers like blogging applications, lifestreaming services, and the like? Many of us rely on WordPress.com, Twitter.com and other free or paid hosted services to run our blogs, save our thoughts, and practically store our memories. Maybe the bigger, more popular companies don’t run the risk of folding up. But the smaller, niche service providers might be riskier. Does this mean everyone should just go with one service like everyone else? Or maybe it’s best to run a self-hosted blog.

Yahoo! 360 will not be missed, except perhaps in Vietnam. Maybe this is one big reason Yahoo! has decided (since 2007) to end support and ultimately pull the plug. It’s probably not cost-effective to maintain a big service when it’s only patronized in one niche or regional market. But then again, Yahoo! could have probably just focused its resources on that particular market, just like how other services like Friendster are doing. The only consolation of big users, at least, is that content can be migrated into a Yahoo! account, and this should likely be hassle-free.

Are your web apps future-proof? Or is there no such thing?

Via Blog Herald and @yahoo.

22 thoughts on “Yahoo! 360 Closing Shop. How Confident Are You With Your Blogging Service Provider?”

  5. The security and peace of mind that I get from paid sites is the reason why I do not go for free websites. Although it’s hard to believe a company as big as yahoo is doing this.

  6. Well it isn’t really worth the effort on a world wide web to maintain a regional site. Maybe Yahoo can come up with something better

  7. Too bad 360 is closing. I did try maintaining a blog there but I forgot I had an account there. I personally maintain a blog on livejournal. And that one has been up and about 5 years now. I wish the users can transfer their posts without any hitches. Though it would definitely be cumbersome.

  12. You’ve got it right! Better to go for self hosted blog than any other FREE services! 🙂

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  13. I’ve always said that building a web presence on a “Free” hosting platform is a recipe for success.

    When I was growing up, there was a lake front community owned by a church where the homeowners would build traditional homes with lake frontage – the only “catch” was that the homeowners did NOT own the land – they leased it from the community.

    It always bothered me – building a house on “rented” ground. Building your business blog on a free platform is even riskier!!!

  15. I had used yahoo around six months ago, but I am not quite satisfied with their services. I would rather go to a smaller service provider, where you get good support.

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  16. Thats too bad. It was a real nice blogging platform and Google indexed and ranked those sites very highly. I actually thought if there was one that they would get rid of, it would have been Geocities. Since Geocities was not really user or search engine “friendly”. Oh well, there are so many free blogging platforms, that most will not feel the loss, except the bloggers that have spent a lot of time and effort in building a great blog at 360.

  17. I’ve been blogging since 1996, or perhaps earlier. Back then, I was considered very strange for putting my diary online for others to read.

    I still use sites such as LiveJournal, but it’s risky to depend on websites owned and controlled by others. That’s why I’m going back to my own hosted website and my own domain.

    For those who’ve been blogging on Yahoo 360: I hope your transition to another option is as easy as possible. “Easy” or not, transferring a large number of blog entries can be time consuming and frustrating. I wish Yahoo 360 users the very best of luck.

  19. I am very confident because I am self hosting with WordPress. I also have an account with blogger that I use and am confident it will continue for the foreseeable future. But I have moved my important blogs to self hosted so I have control.

    I have open ID through wordpress (which means a free blog account too). And I am confident they will continue also.

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  21. This is one of the reasons I went for a self-hosted blog. Gives me more control and stability. Made it easier to brand my blog name to my domain name. Blogs With Wings is hosted on http://www.blogswithwings.com.

    Obviously Yahoo didn’t do a good jog of marketing this particular service in other area, its too bad for those people who put a lot of work time and effort into their blogs.

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