Just had an interesting convergence of unrelated yet related events; on the one hand, I was on a customer call this morning where James and I were took turns disparaging the notion of the so-called “360 degree view of the customer.” Just a few hours later, I found myself playing around with Yahoo’s new blog service, 360 (link to my blog there, and thanks Coté for the invite).
In traditional CRM, information integration, or systems integration terms, a 360 degree view of the customer is achieved by compiling, analyzing and ultimate relating distinct and disparate datapoints concerning a customer. Think purchasing patterns crossed with a customer support history.
Yahoo, IMO, is trying to achieve a similar goal, with the primary difference being that one is user owned and driven and the other is not. Yahoo 360’s most distinguishing characteristic, I think, is its attempt to mash differing pieceparts of your Yahoo identity together in a single space. The “My Blog” link takes you to a pretty standard – if visually underwhelming – blog front end. But head over to the “My Page” link, and Yahoo grafts several other portlet-style components onto the basic blog: Friends, My Groups, Local Reviews, Lists, etc. Basically, it’s like a next generation My Yahoo, but one composed of content you generated.
Given the name – 360 – and this little message on the My Page
“Coming soon…you’ll be able to share your RSS-enabled content (blogs, photos, etc.) in Yahoo! 360°,”
I expect Yahoo to continue enhancing its aggregation-as-a-differentiator message, much as it did with My Yahoo. Just like MSN Spaces, I think 360 can be a nice offering in greenfield scenarios: where a user is coming to the service with very little data or content committed to other web applications (Flickr, Ofoto, MSN, etc). And make no mistake, the greenfield opportunity for blogging is enormous. For all the hype around blogging, it’s light years from a mainstream activity for most, still. But while that’s true for blogging, it’s not necessarily true for photos, or music, or reviews, or lists. Put more simply: many people’s digital identities are highly fragmented, with some content here, other content there, and 360 doesn’t cope well with those now. Nor does Spaces, for that matter, or Typepad, or native MT, or Blogger.
What I’m getting at here is that until we have a standard mechanism for interchanging information from service to service, 360 and its competitors won’t really be 360. They’ll be 320, or 180, or 120. RSS (or Atom) may be the basis for that interchange mechanism, but it’s not enough. Syndication formats are fundamentally one to many, while digital identities will at times demand more granular delivery (a fact we touched on in the Gillmor Gang I was on).
Just look at the options Yahoo provides for viewing permissions: everyone, 3rd degree, friend of friends, private, or friends. Then try to imagine how that could be extended to other, competing services if I decide to take my content elsewhere. Do my permissions come with me, and my “friend” identities? Or take this example: I have public and private photos in Flickr. Anything with people in it is private, everything else is public. Presumably with Yahoo’s Flickr purchase, I may ultimately be able to surface these permissions in Yahoo 360. But what about my MT based blog? How do I federate these authorizations? My permissions? Not so simple.
In a perfect world, I’d get to pick the best photo service, blogging service, music service and so on and blend them seamlessly with permissions as to who can see what and when universally honored. Unfortunately, we’re not there yet. Nor are we all that close. I should be clear too that I’m not knocking Yahoo here; no one that I’m aware of has good answers here. As for 360, if you’re a Yahoo person, it’s probably a fine offering. But the larger questions it raises are many. At the very least, I think it tells me that Liberty should be looking at RSS/Atom and infoware service federation, because sooner rather than later it’s going to be a major issue.
