OK. 360° really goes down the drain… and hell, I have enough of it!!! Video integration broke last week. I start blogging here on WordPress now.
I have to think of this song here 
From 2005 to 2008 I have been the Product Manager of Yahoo! 360° in Germany. I have seen the product from birth to death. From the first PRD (Product Requirement Document) … something like the birth of a product (where you write down your ideas) to the silent death of it. After the first PRD the US released 360° very quickly, but it was not localizable… nobody thought they would need another language than English. It took quite some time to convince people in Europe that they need it and that they need to commit resources to it (means hire some people who look after it). I was one of them. Then we tried to figure out how to localize it. It took an International Community Product Manager based in Sunnyvale to get this project running. Really amazing job. We launched then 360° in Germany about 2005. All went very good. Unique Users, Page Views… everything grew as expected. In Germany especially the users have been very engaged. They generated more page views than in the other countries. So what happened?
To be frankly. I’m still not really sure today. Many strange things happened (I know this is against corp blog guidelines, but Brad left Y! and many other things happened since then – so I think I can tell that now):
1. The US team worked on a new release that would have been really great. Drag & Drop of modules, more new features etc. – it was canceled – forever (it was totally trashed). Many months of work. Lost…
2. Mr. Brad Galinghouse (big boss at that time in the US – better known as Mr. Peanut butter) announced one day he knows very well the market and we need to rename Yahoo! 360° in Yahoo! Spaces. Well… total bullshit as MSN had the name Spaces (later Windows Live Spaces) and MySpace had it too. In the last minute before the “point of no return” the US team canceled the renaming.
3. Then our internal data analysis team SDS told us Yahoo! 360° is a failure after analyzing the target audience that we reached. Ok, we didn’t get the blogger kiddies, but we got a very attractive age group, especially attractive for advertisers as the older people have more money usually. So total bullshit in my opinion.
4. One day we heard that 360° is EOL. Yes, that has been a new word to me. It means “End of life”. Dead. Finto. Hasta la vista.
So all ended up in this situation today where we have a broken 360°. We are going to launch the new Profiles soon that is supposed to import 360° data, Mash (Mesh, Mosh) data and legacy Profiles (Member Directory) data. But the latest is that 360° won’t get the import soon (for whatever reason)… so I have a broken personal blog on 360°… and what? I had to move off due to this bullshit. I’m not alone. There are many many users affected. Why am I writing this? I’m frustrated probably. Nobody will read it I guess. So it doesn’t matter anyway. Kind of therapy for me 
If you read it. Forget about it.
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