↓ Meme goes public… officially consider themselves as a “light-blogging platform”

[tweetmeme] Yahoo Brasil (the guys behind meme) have been pretty busy for the past few months polishing and updating their new little kid… “meme”.

After introducing the Spanish & English versions a pair of months ago as well as opening it for developers willing to create new APIs, a few themes and of course a mobile version the little purple Yahoo espoir leaves the Alpha honeycomb to get dressed in a bigger & better Public Beta version.

meme's new homepage with popular feeds & updates

So anything new since our first review?

We’ve been using it for several months and meme hasn’t changed its essence: share all you’ve got and get reposted in order to get followers. It couldn’t be simpler, yet, many users are getting tired of not having a wider range of options & functionalities.

The main problem with meme today is that most users vomit content into their blogs without paying any attention at what’s being said. It looks like Yahoo’s dog hasn’t become a complete & finished product in itself but rather a “hot-image” reposting platform. Apart from funny & geeky images very few videos or texts are being shared, and obviously the “audio” tool is ignored by the vast majority of its users. Many of them get this same “incomplete” feeling and the number of abandoned or inactive accounts it’s growing.

On the other hand, its Asiatic & Latin success have made meme become a fairly successful micro-blogging tool (or light-blogging as they call themselves), especially during Chinese sanctions when Asiatic geeks are forced to leave their facebooks & twitters.

This is not twitter!

Some eternal claims like direct messaging, clear & separated commenting options or a longer list of popular posts should definitely be taken into account, but again this is not twitter, it was never conceived as a birdie competitor (although some twit-dog killing images suggest the opposite).

Yahoo Brasil have a few sharper ideas for this product: it’s micro-blogging yes but it also looks like Yahoo is trying very hard to integrate, promote & syndicate its very own content inside meme and vice-versa. Some Yahoo channels (music, celebrities…) or Groups have their very own account to try and bring users back into the Yahoo universe of portals. Looks like for now it isn’t working, very few followers and hardly any reposts….

… digging into their Terms of Service (still in Portuguese for now) looks like Yahoo is using the same twitter-philosophy:  nothing you publish belongs to us but! Regarding Yahoo Groups they might use what you’ve just published …. why would they want to reuse all those thousands of images, videos or music published by meme users?

Here at aqnb we can’t and won’t hide we love meme, sometimes it’s addictive as they say but we’re still getting this awkward feeling that meme’s potential is being left aside. São Paulo’s Yahoo team is decorating meme with lots of beautiful garlands (themes, mobile version….) some of them are the next-logical step for a popular real-time tool; however for us and many users out there if they don’t start including some meme-serious features then it will never be able to win any battle (and they’ll end up being killed like most Yahoo services lately…).

Now that it’s public we encourage you all to use it and give lots & lots of feedback … they’re going to need it.

See you @ Madrid