Yahoo 360° Closing

Yahoo! has announced that they are closing down 360° early next year. They aim to make a universal profile to replace all the different ones currently used. Yahoo! claims that none of your content like contacts and blogs will be deleted but it is Yahoo! we're talking about here.

So now it's time to find a substitute, either as a backup plan or on a more permanent basis if you're fed up with Yahoo! and their inability to consistently offer services and/or make them work correctly. The three I hear the most are MySpace, Facebook and Multiply.

MySpace is kind of a pain in the ass. It generally seems to take multiple clicks to get anywhere or find anything. They've made it easier to customize your pages but overall it's still not all that easy to control how your page looks. Most customization requires you getting code from a non-MySpace site and pasting it in. Blog privacy options are good, each entry can be set individually unlike 360°. You can make photo albums and all that, but it's nothing special. I have a MySpace page but I never use it.

Multiply is much better in my opinion. Customizing is easier, there are several premade themes you can pick from and user groups onsite with thousands more. You can easily hide and restore content modules on your page or drag and drop to rearrange them. There are multiple privacy levels ranging from specific users all the way up to everyone. Blog entry sharing options can be set individually per entry. What I like most is that everything is easy to find, when you log in you are taken to a page that shows you updates from all of your contacts, or if you choose it can show just yours, or those from contacts of your contacts, etc... You also have control over how these are displayed to you. One huge plus is that Multiply has a couple of Import tools for 360°. One enables you to import your blog entries with almost no effort. You lose the comments but your blog entry is preserved, html and all. Another tool enables you to invite any or all of your 360° contacts to Multiply in a couple quick easy steps. Overall I much prefer the look and feel of Multiply.