Thanks to Stephen, I got hooked up with a Yahoo 360 invite. I wanted to kick the tires to see what they've come up with in their big fancy social networking system.
The coolest thing I see so far is the concept of friend-of-a-friend. I imagine it's completely compatible with FOAF, but they expose preferences settings to let you restrict access to stuff (your blog, commenting on your blog, photos, etc...) to a list of options:
- Everyone
- Third Degree
- Friends of friends
- Private (just me)
I couldn't find an Official Description of "Third Degree" - but I think that's "Friends of friends' friends" - which could be a really interesting way to build up a microcommunity based on people you know and/or trust. Either that, or it's a bright spotlight being shone on an intimidated suspect sitting on a cold metal chair. Either way, it's pretty cool to have that at your fingertips.
I have to agree with Joshua's comment on this: "It's funny it took [them] this long to release a blog service." I wonder what they're planning on doing with it. Between this and their recent acquisition of Flickr, they are sure trying hard to get some momentum back in the social software game.
Anyway, here's my Y360 blog - with the icky GUID-inspired URL and all (the setting to generate friendlier URLs appears to be borked at the moment).