Marc Hedlund examines Yahoo 360 using Lessons from Lucasfilm’s Habitat (Best. Essay. EVAR.) as his guide, since one of the authors of LLH was Randall Farmer, one of the creators of Y360.
Hedlund comes away skeptical, noting that the lack of interoperable standards and widely available APIs violate some of the LLH tenets, as with the LLH assertion “Data communications standards are vital.”
Those who do not learn the lessons of Habitat are doomed to repeat them, indeed. In 360, we see this problem, the lack of communication standards, expressed most acutely in the IM sidebar, which lists the online status of all of your buddies — excuse me, your Yahoo buddies. You can IM them and send them messages in the system (messages which are like email but not email, so that you have yet a third voice with which to speak to a subset of your friends). Why do I need a web view on my IM buddy list when I have that list on my computer already? If 360 becomes your home, perhaps that would be useful.
The fault here is easy to see with a thought experiment. Let’s say Yahoo 360 were implemented today by a startup, a company without ties or loyalty to an existing body of users. Would they make the same decision? Is it in the best interest of new users to 360 to have their Yahoo buddies be the only ones available for sharing, or is that more in the interest of Yahoo?
Data communication standards are vital, and the lack of them has kept IM from becoming a platform for innovation as email and the web have become. 360 suffers from the lack of a standard just as would any startup, but it hasn’t sought out a solution, as would a company that needed new users to survive.
I’m less convinced than Marc that this is fatal, starting from the premise that much human congress happens within essentially arbitrary divisions like this one — you know your co-workers on the 5th floor or your neighbors on your street better than you know the people on the 6th floor, or on the next block over.
However, I am, like Marc, convinced that this ‘proprietary standards and messaging’ weakness will prevent 360 from becoming a complete digital hub. It may simply be a good fusion of Orkut and fotolog.
1. Marc Hedlund on March 30, 2005 5:37 PM writes...
Thanks for the comments. I don't think *any* of the criticisms I made are fatal for 360; just that they are faults, and that those faults may contain the spread of the service. Using the IM analogy again, people still use Yahoo Messenger though it is a closed system; but it is not a platform for other applications as it could have been.
It's certainly not the case that 360 is unusable or flat-out bad; I just wish it were more. I wish it had the brilliance of "Lessons" clearly evident throughout. (And, on the privacy tip, I wish it let me get my data out as well as in -- just as Bloglines, del.icio.us, Basecamp, and Flickr all do.)
Permalink to Comment2. Steve Gillmor on March 30, 2005 7:50 PM writes...
Excellent post, and bingo, Marc. It's a Roach Motel.
Permalink to Comment3. john on March 31, 2005 2:01 PM writes...
While I'm sure your comments have something to do with ... something about the service ... they have nothing to do with me or my mom. I'm a 360 user and have invited my family to join and my mom now has a blog.
But the messenger vitality is useful.
Permalink to CommentAnd 360 isn't a startup, it's yahoo