Recently I moved my personal blog over to Yahoo! 360. Why? Let's follow the trail, which is a good example of a single killer app helping make a company.
First, I do not like Yahoo! search nearly as much as Google. So I have been using Google (or A9 which uses Google) for years. I even posted months ago how much work Yahoo! needs to do to catch up. So searching on Yahoo! was definitely NOT the reason for the switch to Yahoo! 360. So what was?
I wanted to get a subscription service for my music and Yahoo! was by far the cheapest. They only charge $4.99 / month with one year service compared to $14.99 / month for Napster. Price hooked me. The Yahoo! music engine is okay, but not great. It's still in Beta so I will forgive their minor flaws. But I still use iTunes to find the songs I want, then switch over to Yahoo! to download them. The selection is great, so I'm not complaining. Combine the service with my new Creative Zen Micro, and music purchasing has disappeared from my habit list.
So I sign up and Yahoo! sends me information about the My Yahoo! personal start pages and how I can integrate my playlists. So I check out their portal service, and guess what? I love it. Plain, simple and delivers exactly what I want from a start page. Before I was using Google News whiched I switched to after MSN lost all my settings. I wasn't really happy with it, but it worked.
As part of My Yahoo! you can store bookmarks. So I set a dozen basic bookmarks I use frequently on the home page and now Yahoo!'s ad let's me know about My Web 2.0. This is their social bookmarking site which is really a rip off of del.icio.us. But it's a rip off that does a better job. Unlike del.icio.us, I can set private bookmarks or make them available to only my friends. It integrates with Yahoo! Search to track your search history and inform you when you are searching for something you or a friend has already found on the web.
Okay, so this Yahoo! thing is working out and I go poking around for other stuff and I find Yahoo! Photos. This provides an easy way for me to upload ALL of my photos to the web for sharing with my friends (and free backup). There is that friend thing again. That natural draw of other users to the service.
To keep things simple for myself and everyone else, wouldn't it be easier to have a personal page that acts as my blog that also ties into all these other services I have started using. Finally we get to Yahoo! 360, combined blog, music sharing, photo sharing service. While the blog is not that flashy, it's easy. And that's all I really want for a brain dump site. Now I have kuhl.ws and 360.yahoo.com/scottkuhl. One for work related information, the other for personal.
And finally, we are back to searching. While the search results are not as good as Google, they are good enough. When you add in all this integrated history, bookmarking, blogging, etc. it adds enough insentive to settle for the lessor of two search engines. But when Yahoo! turns up less than stellar results, I still head back to Google.
I have started using the Calendar and Task features and will probably use the Mail features but only as a place to forward on my regular domain account. This way everyone else keeps e-mailing scott@kuhl.ws but I can check them at Yahoo!. Why do this? So I can take down my Exchange Hosted mail and divert the cost toward something else. I'm still not sure I will do this, but the potetial is there.
So, now I am using 6 different services + from a vendor I would not even consider 3 months ago. The power of the killer app!
Welcome to my tech blog. My primary focus is development but I did spend a few years recently on the networking side. You will find that most of the items relate to Microsoft based technology. It's not that I have anything against Java, Linux, etc. It's just not what I do. If life were Star Wars, I would be a Storm Trooper.
