[Ict4devwg] IT: Yahoo 360 to close on July 13

[Vern Weitzel]

This is a bummer for 360 advocates.

Subject: [vnnews-l] IT: Yahoo 360 to close on July 13
Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 00:54:33 -0700
From: Stephen Denney <srdenney at gmail.com>
To: vnnews-l at anu.edu.au

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10252314-93.html



May 29, 2009 2:18 PM PDT
Yahoo 360 to close on July 13

by Dong Ngo <http://www.cnet.com/profile/ngodong/>

After almost two years without providing any support, Yahoo has finally
decided to shut down its blog-centric social Web site Yahoo 360 Degrees
<http://360.yahoo.com/>completely on July 13. During its more than four
years of existence, the site has never actually been out of the beta stage.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

In an e-mail to its members, the company said, "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."

Yahoo 360 was launched in March 2005. The site never became big in the
United States and in October 2007, Yahoo decided to stop providing support
for it.

However, in other countries, especially Vietnam, the site has been the most
popular blogging portal. For this reason, Vietnamese users can migrate their
Yahoo 360 content to Yahoo 360Plus <http://vn.360plus.yahoo.com/>, a product
specifically made for the Vietnamese market that the company announced a
year ago.

Last August, Yahoo also shut down
Mash<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10028716-36.html>,
which was another failed attempt into social Web sites.

This is sad news for thousands, if not millions, of people worldwide, since
for a lot of them the blogs posted on Yahoo 360 and the friends they have
there are part of their lives. Yahoo recommends that Yahoo 360 users
immediately move their blogs to their current Yahoo profile to save them and
download their contacts onto a computer. There are also options to migrate
blogs to other blogging sites.

You can find out more information on how to do that
here<http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/360/shutdown/>
.

Dong Ngo is a CNET editor who covers networking and network storage, and
writes about anything else he finds interesting. You can also listen to his
podcast at 
insidecnetlabs.cnet.com<http://www.cnet.com/inside-cnet-labs/?categoryId=9958852>.
E-mail Dong <dong.ngo at cnet.com>.