It looks like Yahoo planning something different, recently they have shutdown many of their services and now they announced a deal to buy TV sharing app IntoNow. This clearly states that Yahoo working on to increase its social media presence and looking forward to expand into mobile internet market by increasing video advertising on site.

According to BBC News, Yahoo states that:

Relying on social channels as a means for discovering content – whether it’s on a PC, mobile device, or TV – is rapidly on the rise.
IntoNow’s technology combines the ability to check-in to what a consumer is watching, engage in conversations, and find related content.

There are no details on how much this costs. For those who do not know, IntoNow’s software offers user to identify TV shows with an option to share them with friends using mobile internet. This application is integrated with Facebook, Twitter, iTunes and Netflix.

Yahoo has been on a layoff again, only this time it has affected more than just the people in the company. With the people fired, Yahoo will also have to downsize on its products including Delicious, MyBlogLog, Yahoo Buzz and Alta Vista.

There have been rumours of this downsizing for the last few days. However, slowly Yahoo has been confirming the rumours. The product list downsizing was also was discussed in an all hands meeting after the layoffs.

In a statement, Yahoo communicated

Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond.

We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate, it added

Yahoo has been acquiring a few products as part of mergers and acquisition. However, on some of the products it has not been able to work on or better it. Some of these products were added to the list that they are planning to remove support for. Though most of the products in the list were not surprising, Delicious was particularly disappointing for Yahoo users

It seems that Yahoo does not want to give up about it’s non-existence on the social media sphere and desperately wants an entry into the most happening and talked about word on the internet. After unsuccessfully trying and then shutting down Yahoo 360 and another service for the Indians only, it’s trying out on an new concept which is a Twitter + Facebook = Meme.

I recently got an invite and decided to give the new application a try. Yes, a of now, it’s by invite only.

Yahoo Meme is by invite only

Well, if you are a person who wants reads the conclusion first, then my view is it is definitely worth a try. Let’s come to the detailed analysis of Meme.

First and foremost is that anyone can follow anyone, you don’t need permissions and do not necessarily follow back, just like twitter. People can see your tweets or mem’s or whatever it will be called, but only if they view your profile. Unlike twitter or facebook, a meme home page does not list what everyone tweets or shares. It shows only your own mem’s (I’ve decided to call it mem). It has a dashboard (add wordpress to the above equation) which is the page, where you can mem your text, image, audio or video. Yes, you read that right, you can share text, audio, video and pictures – that’s facebook minus the audio.

Yahoo Meme allows 4 things to be shared

What is good or rather best is that it also allows something between a 140 character tweet and a 300 word long blog post. No, there is no restriction on the character length, you can write as much or as little as you want. For me this was the best thing as it allows people to open up again and not try to bump everything in just 140 characters and on the other hand avoid writing long blog articles too.

The other thing good is that from the first day itself it’s supporting 3 languages, English, Espanol and Portugese unlike twitter which, till date (I think it’s been 3 years in existence now), has support for only 2 languages, English and Japanese. Well, the three languages may not be of much use to you as of now but this definitely shows that they will be having multiple language support very soon, signs that they don’t want to target just the English speaking audience, eyeing to cater a much larger base.

Yahoo meme supports 3 languages

Yahoo meme has another cool feature, which is that it allows you to view popular mem’s, something like the trending topics on twitter, but not exactly that. Well, still not very clear what popular will always show, but it definitely had pics and the number of times they were mem’d when I clicked Popular. You can view the result of that here.
And yes, you can REPOST (retweet in twitter lingo) that mem from anyone else.

Last but not the least, there’s something for the marketers as well – Search. Still not extensive as it lists out only profiles containing the search keyword but if they are to survive I guess they will have to work out on it. Of course when they go live, yeah they are still in alpha, there will be hundreds of third party applications that will be developed around it but in order to see a different fate from it’s previous social media experiments, Yahoo must have an inbuilt search engine, at least a comprehensive one if not extensive.

With the kind of features it has as of now, a little better search and a slightly changed home page might definitely put it ahead of twitter, unless twitter adds something new to it’s current features.

Well that’s what my observations are, I may have missed something, do drop in to discuss things or tell me features which I may have missed and more importantly let me hear your take on whether it will overtake twitter or not ?

Once in a blue moon I happen to open my yahoo inbox and guess what i found? Yahoo 360, the place where you connect with the people who matter to you most, is shutting down operations.

This is what the mail said :

Dear Yahoo! 360° customer,

We will be officially closing Yahoo! 360° on July 13, 2009, to focus our efforts on making your new profile on Yahoo! the place where you connect with the people who matter to you most. As a result, you will need to move your 360° information to your new profile before this date. After July 12, 2009, your content on Yahoo! 360° will no longer be accessible. Here are some details to guide you through this transition…….

Yahoo360 Shutting Down

As a matter we shouldn’t be surprised to know this. The service, which like gmail, was always accompanied with the “beta” tag has finally decided to call off the service. Though there have been rumours about the service going off air since the past two years, no real decision was taken uptil last week when they quitely made that announcement. A service which even after so many years of existence could not hit the mark and could never prove what is was. Infact last week when inquired about the service by a friend, I couldn’t explain exactly what it is or rather was.

But I must admit that I was a bit surprised also. A giant as big as Yahoo!, launching a sort of social networking application and still being unsuccessful after so many years and that too in an era when social networking is at its peak. So many networking sites coming up and taking the stage in this crowd, Yahoo 360 could never make it big.

Well, all I can say is all the best to Yahoo, I just hope we are not nearing the end of the Yahoo era!

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Yes its quite true that Yahoo announced late on Monday that Jerry Yang, would step down from his role as soon as the board finds a replacement with a new CEO.Yahoo has hired executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles for evaluating best candidates for the top post.The most probable reasons for this big change is the shareholders his failure to agree to a deal with Microsoft.

Do you really know that Yahoo decided to step down Jerry Yang as Yahoo CEO?

What is the role of Jerry Yang as a CEO in Yahoo?

Jefferies & Co analyst Youssef Squali in a research note says that

“Jerry’s resignation as CEO reflects failed promises he made while fighting off Microsoft’s offers, and the board’s displeasure with his go-it-alone strategy”