GoingOn and Yahoo! 360 — a Pre-Emptive Move?

The would-be meta-social networking tool, GoingOn, was covered last week by a few folks (mostly the Mercury News and blogs). Advocates said nobody wants to fill out more profiles; skeptics questioned whether the existing social networks would want to play.

Michael Bazeley at SiliconBeat now reports that Yahoo! is opening up 360 to third-party content, including your other blogs (got more than one?) and social-networking content. This generally mirrors what Yahoo! did with HotJobs and may also reflect that people aren't adopting/populating 360 as fast as desired.

An alternative way to read this is as another implementation of Yahoo!'s FUSE (Find, Use, Share, and Expand) strategy — in this case "expand." The move clearly makes 360 a more broadly useful tool (and more like MyYahoo!) and may be a pre-emptive strike against GoingOn-type apps that seek to address the too-many-networks, too-many-profiles problem.

From Yahoo! 360 news:

Now you can bring it all onto your Yahoo! 360š page to share with family and friends. Display updated posts from your blogs (Live Journal, Typepad, Xanga, and WordPress), your Netflix movie queue or movie recommendations, and much, much more. You'll find the new "Feeds" module by clicking "My Page."

What gets really interesting is when Yahoo! brings MyWeb, 360 and MyYahoo! together. (And where does Konfabulator fit in?)

It's an overlay, a pre-browser entry point for these apps. Right now search is a widget, but 360 could be accessed via widget and there are widget RSS readers. I don't know if widgets will catch on widely, but I'm really having a great time downloading and playing with them.

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Related: Charlene Li's ideas re why Konfabulator is about more than just 'widget' propagation.

More about GoingOn and the meta-social network