Hot on the heels of news about Blogger's problems comes the announcement of Yahoo's new blog offering: Yahoo! 360°. (Doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it? "Yahoo three sixty degrees"... "Yahoo three sixty" would be better. Which gets me wondering about titling this post "Yahoo comes full circle", heh. Although it hasn't really. But anyway.)
Yahoo's 360° isn't yet open to the public, but in the meantime they've been playing in another of Google's sandboxes lately, purchasing the popular and clever photo sharing site Flickr. Google bought Picasa last year, and while they haven't rechristened it with a more Google-centric name yet (Piccle? Picca? Plogger? Ick!) apparently that is on the cards for down the track once they determine exactly how best to make use of it.
Microsoft also jumped into the blogosphere last year, launching MSN Spaces (is anyone actually using that?) and one must ponder whether they will follow the pack again and buy up a true online photo sharing tool soon. (They already offer simple photo sharing via MSN Messenger, but it's integrated, not standalone.) There are a few photo sharing sites still available for them. (If they hurry.)
[Prediction? I'm putting my money on Pixagogo, which offers photo printing on true photo paper as well as the sharing bit, plus international shipping. Nice, clean UI, added value for money-hungry MSN-ers. (Although, one must ask, are printed photos a dying species?) Then there's ImageEvent, who have a similar but more expansive service, allowing prints to be made into jigsaw puzzles, calendars and other gifty-type things. I'm guessing one of those two will be snapped up soon.]
That's not all the players in this battle though: HP have recently acquired SnapFish, moving in hard on the photo printing scene.
And also this week, Yahoo! Mail matched Gmail's super-sized 1Gb of email space winner, just after Gmail has started offering accounts to random Google users. (A bit too late, some would say, although possibly they had a whiff of Yahoo's plans and were forced to play their trump card to stay ahead of the pack.)
Back to the issue though, can someone please tell me: What is it with these groups? There seems to be an awful lot of follow-the-leader going on lately. (With MS doing an awful lot of tailing.) Why do these mega-giants confine themselves to constantly fighting for the same group of users online?
Web applications are growing at a rate of knots, even making uneducated CNN editors predict we'll all be ditching our machines and logging onto a web-based thin client-type operating system sometime in the near future. And even though said editor really has no clue, [yeah, like we'd trust Google -- or, worse, MSN -- enough to beam them all our data] it is interesting to watch the flap going on amongst the web giants, each eager to grab that one special tool that will next drive our world.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
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