Two months ago when knowing Altered Zones was no-more we panicked. Where are we going to get our amazing news from besides label newsletters, pr agencies and artists themselves? AZ and it’s great galaxy of indie music blogs …
somehow related
The Verge
The Engadgetians got independent! That’s how most on-line publications have described the launching of flashy site “The Verge“, our new technology, gadget and nerdiness temple. And we salute Joshua Topolsky, Nilay Patel and many other ex-Engadget columnists with …
Intermediary who?
The music market is, from all the art industries, the one which has probably suffered more changes and (forced) evolutions in the distribution and PR models over the last decade. Bleeding labels, piracy issues, market monopoles, streaming services …
↓ Meme: the unfinished twitter experience by Yahoo
Two weeks ago we got our invitation for Yahoo’s latest social idea: meme (for now only aimed at the Brazilian-Portuguese market). There’s been quite a lot of buzz around it… Yahoo’s twitter competitor? Another social network?
Yahoo is definitely looking forward into the social network business; they know that future audiences will inevitably come from those facebooks, twitters or linkedins. So now that every single internet-media player it’s coming up with its own SN why not them?
Unifying their mail, Q&A, Flickr’s… users and other communities is a potential strength and defy that Yahoo must attack and bring together as to increase its portal’s audience. Will meme help?
After registering (you need a Yahoo account) and login in we find an extremely simplistic and intuitive page with 4 big buttons to publish either mini text posts, photos, videos or music (unfortunately you can’t mix them because this is not a proper blog).
Posting any of this is just as easy as twitting: click on what you prefer to post:
- a short text post (most like a real-time feed) without apparently any word / character limit
- an image/photo you can upload from your computer or link with a 200 character limited description
- any video Only from Youtube (also with a 200 limited description)
- or any mp3 file hosted anywhere else on the web (also 200 limit).
On top you’ll find the menu bar for inviting any friends via mail, preferences, number of followers, “find” people and a link to your public meme.
For now finding anyone interesting on the meme network is quite frustrating as the number of users is so low that the “other memes” button shows the same 20-25 people over and over again.
As Techcrunch said, the meme experience has quite a lot about tumblr but I don’t think is an ordinary rip off as they described it.
Yahoo’s Meme intends to fusion the benefits of microblogging with real-time feeds ala twitter with an extremely simplistic interface, like other Yahoo’s services.
Your posts have a permalink ok but you can only delete them (no editing options then), the “two mini-seconds ago” notification is present on your friend’s posts … .but on the other hand there’s no public “memes” feed, no search in real time, no open strategy!
The objective of Yahoo’s meme is quite unclear, half twitter – half tumblr it gives a mixed feeling if you’re used to “blog” and “twit” in separate services. Mr Antonio Carlos Silveira (another meme) reacted to one of our meme posts saying…
“The openess will come; the product is still in private alpha and developing the basic functionality”.
Does this mean that they intend to add public feed, real-time search and invite developers to “embrace and extend” their service?
Can’t wait to see what Yahoo has prepared for us
See you @ Rennes