Jash’s Blog

Yahoo! has announced that it is killing yet another product. This time its Yahoo’s Buzz. Yahoo launched Buzz a few years ago when Digg was a popular means of social news discovery and sharing. As social sharing has bottled up into social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, people are not actively using sites like Digg. I feel this is just a soical media transition. Yahoo has decided to pull the plug on April 21st 2011. Here is their announcement:

Yahoo! Buzz will be discontinued as of April 21, 2011. As of this date, you will be unable to access the Yahoo! Buzz site. This was a hard decision. However this will help us focus on our core strengths and new innovations.

We appreciate your patronage.

The Yahoo! Buzz Team

Social media is an evolving field and we will see many attractive services be born, live a long life and die… As of now, RIP Yahoo! Buzz.

So Apple launched a new Social Networking service along with a few new products last week. I signed up on Ping when it was announced, or when iTunes 10 went live and have been using it since a week. So whats Ping? Just your own profile with activity of accounts you follow. More like facebook status updates where you can write comments. Apple’s intention was to allow people to discover music by following people and encountering new music that they like. Another thing with Ping is that you can follow music artists and get updates from them directly. This is one of the popular features of Ping. However the down side is that only a handful of artists are on Ping and most of the artists are not registered. This is one of the things that breaks Ping’s usability. Another issue is finding people you know or adding friends. Initially Apple had Facebook Connect that allowed you to see your facebook friends who use Ping and add them. But due to some issues, Apple silently pulled that feature out of Ping. So what’s left? Well.. you can follow people who you know are on Ping and see what they like in iTunes Store or what they purchase from iTunes Store, if at all they use iTunes Store. In a nutshell, I think Ping is a failure as most people I asked about Ping said that its useless so they have turned it off. The only people using it right now are techies. They are just testing the new service out. Other than that, Apple, I think you should keep out of the social networking business…

Continue reading »

Yahoo! has announced that Yahoo! 360, the social networking service by Yahoo! will be closing on July 13th. Yahoo! 360 consisted of a blog and “connections” or friends. The reason behind discontinuing this service is not mentioned, however users of Yahoo! 360 were sent an E-mail saying that they are re-branding Yahoo! 360 as Yahoo! Profiles. Yes, I know Google just launched Google Profiles, and this is exactly the same thing by Yahoo! but with a little bit of enhancements.

I would call this a mixture of Google Profiles with Wordpress and Twitter. The main page of Yahoo! Profile displays information about the user and a display picture, along with the status (What are you doing?). Users also get a blog and friends list.

Continue reading »

Have you got several accounts on the internet and finding it difficult to manage all of them?  Then, Fuser makes things easy for you. Fuser is a web service that allows you to manage all your E-Mail mailboxes, Social network accounts and Twitter accounts from one place. Fuser currently supports Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and AOL mail for E-mail and Facebook, MySpace and Twitter for Social networking.

Note that its completely Java based and will not run on computers where Java is not installed.

Continue reading »