Yahoo! Blog Platform: New, but “Old”

Yahoo! never gives up on experimenting on their products. After closing their social platform Friendster-like profile and blog Yahoo! 360, now they launched their own blog platform. It is not yet officially launched for Indonesia, but you still can register your Yahoo! Account, as well as Google and Facebook account to use their open beta version. In some other countries such as Korea, this service is available since 2010.

In a glance, the features they offer are also available on WordPress.com or Blogspot. Haswar Hafid from Yahoo! Indonesia said that Yahoo! blog has basic feature to customize layout, to upload or link photos and videos, also rich text and HTML editor. What makes Yahoo! Blog different and more unique than other blogs are:

1. Widget to track blog performance on dashboard. You can check pageviews, comments, and basic activities on your blog.
2. Page setting to create homepage or special image page for example.
3. Allow us to arrange license from contents.

Different themes and different columns setting are available for your convenience. Among all those features, a tad different one is the feature to license our own choice. There six choice of license other than “All right reserved”, namely Attribution Creative Commons, Attribution- ShareAlike Creative Commons, Attribution-NoDerivs Creative Commons, Attribution- NonCommercial Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons, dan Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivs Creative Commons. I don’t understand much about license, so it will be better if you check it out yourself in Creative Commons’ website.

For vanilla URL, you can get URL of your choice as long as it is still available, although by default you will be given a URL address with strange characters at first. For example, for my own URL, I can choose http://blog.yahoo.com/amir.karimuddin. Only for each articles, they still can’t implement a more user friendly permalink, such as with simple numbering or better yet–link based on article’s title, editable like the ones in WordPress or Tumblr platform.

My prediction? In the market dominated by Blogspot, WordPress.com, Posterous, and Tumblr, I don’t think blog platform offered by Yahoo! offers anything different than the others, all in terms of design, accessibility (e.g. sending post by email or other application), or its user friendliness. I don’t have the exact data yet, but seeing it’s (not so) enthusiastic users, I think they also agree with me. It is a big question mark, looking at how Yahoo! still tries to experiment on their other products when their other services are still yet to be standing on still ground. What do Yahoo! expect from this product?

Translated by Nita Sellya.