Twitter fever has caught up with Yahoo!, finally. It is official now. Yahoo! is launching its own Twitter-like micro-blogging platform Yahoo Meme in English too. After having launched Yahoo Meme in Portuguese and Spanish languages earlier, perhaps to test the market, Yahoo Meme is now being launched in English.
However, it appears that Yahoo Meme is still in the early stages – by invitation. Right now, you cannot directly create your account with Yahoo Meme in English language; but you can register for creating your account with it by leaving your email address. See below:
And, this is the response I got after I left my email address for opening an account with it:
Till now, I have not got any email confirmation / invitation from Yahoo allowing me access to Yahoo Meme. Therefore, it appears to be coming out from behind the screen in phases. However, if you already have an account with Yahoo Meme (may be through your earlier account in Portuguese or Spanish language), you can login straightaway as it offers a login for existing members, as shown in the following figure:
As the adjoining image would show, Yahoo Meme is presently available in three languages. In fact, English support has just been added but, perhaps, not made fully operational for all; one has to wait for the invitation mail to arrive after you leave your email at the site.
Visit this ReadWriteWeb page for some earlier details of the features offered in Meme in its Portuguese version which was launched a few months back. Also see this TechCruch page. These initial details show that you can include text, images, videos and music on your micro-blog at Meme. You can also add a brief title, and a description to it. You can search public accounts of others in Meme and follow them. Updates from the users whom you follow would appear in your stream. You can also ‘repost’ an entry posted by some other person which is similar to ‘retweet’ feature on Twitter.
With its reputation for closing services some years after launch, Yahoo! will have to push it really hard to make Meme a success. For example, Yahoo! had earlier closed Geocities, a free web-hosting service which had many users and at one time used to be quite popular. Yahoo! Search is also not doing that well and is nowhere close to Google Search; it is no match to Google Search in quality and quantity of content as well as in speed of updating the latest contents in search results. Perhaps, due to such past experiences with Yahoo!, the initial reaction of Internet-users to Meme launch has not been favorable. Of course, to be fair to Yahoo!, its Yahoo! Mail still continues to be the market leader with about 300 million users. Windows Live (along with Hotmail) of Microsoft has not been able to replace Yahoo! Mail in its market leader position so far. And, inspite of all its might, Google has not been able to push its Gmail any closer to Yahoo! Mail in so far as numbers are concerned. Similarly, Yahoo! Finance is much ahead of Google Finance in content-quality and market-reach. Perhaps, it appears that if you have already taken market-leader position in a particular field at a time when your rivals were still sleeping, people get used to that service and would generally not shift their loyalties to the rival / clone service unless the clone can offer something really killing which can topple the original from its lead position. Twitter is in a similar leader position today in so far as micro-blogging is concerned. So, one has to wait and watch.
I don’t want to write off Yahoo Meme at such earlier stages. But, as I said above, Yahoo! will have to push it really hard to make it a success. Moreover, one does not know how many more web-service providers (Google?) will catch the Twitter-fever in future. Of course, going by past experience, Google would be interested more in gobbling up Twitter by taking it over (and rename it as Google Twitter) provided Biz Stone and company are interested.
Did you like this article? To get all such articles from Tech Superb directly:
Related Articles:
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
Expectedly Meme is not impressive. Yahoo will not find it easy to beat Twitter.
I adore Yahoo! Meme! It’s so much more fun to use!
With a bit of finetuning and a great marketing campaign I think they might finally have a winner on their hands.
It’s no longer invitation only everyone can get their meme now.
Mine’s at http:// meme. yahoo. com/hypedworld