And less than a week later, Yahoo announces the closing of 360, now scheduled for July.

Had these two posts loaded quickly, allowed comments from outsiders, etc. I might have had 2 to 3 times the visitors and those visitors would have seen Yahoo ads, if Yahoo knew how to properly place ads. Now, imagine if Yahoo had also promoted my site a little when it suddenly saw all these visitor hits to my Blog over a short space of time. With a little promotion, I might have gone viral and suddenly had a reason to continue my Yahoo360 Blog, rather than what I have had to do, essentially move posts of this nature to a new Blogging Network, where it is easier for me to post and easier for people to go to my Blogposts.

Even so, I am staying with Yahoo360 for now with the hope that Yahoo will come to its senses. Much of what Bob suggests above is what Yahoo should have done long ago. People stopped posting on their Yahoo360 Blogs due to no fixes for the many bugs that have cropped up, plus a lack of promotion for anyone but a few select Bloggers. I sometimes think Corporate people at Yahoo want to destroy the company so Big Corporate America can take it over and suck it dry. Also, to merge with Microsoft is the height of stupidity. This would mean the end to Yahoo. Selling the Search Engine would also be stupid, whether to Microsoft or Google or anyone else.

Listen to Bob, Yahoo. He has some good ideas. A CEO who drops F-bombs does not a successful company make. One who grows a company and its profits, while keeping the company intact and profitable, that's what makes a successful company. As a former loyal fan of Yahoo, I have watched it grow to Corporate and too customer unfriendly. It is ran for Corporate Management these days. Will the new lady CEO return Yahoo to the PEOPLE? Time will tell. Thank you.

It's e-mail & IM services are both good. It has message boards & e-mail groups. It owns Delicious & BuZZ which are good ways to share links. Their blogging service is good enough. Y! also owns Flikr, which is an excellent place to & post photos. It's got a casual gaming site which is as good as the apps provided by Myspace & Facebook.

IMO, Yahoo needs to improve it's music service by allowing people to stream individual songs, as they can on Myspace & Last.fm. It also needs to beef up it's video sharing capabilities. Finally, it needs to tie it all together with a much better UI. It's graphics are simply too "bulky" & old fashioned. The site appears to be based around presenting text rather than graphics & video That will need to change.

Even if Yahoo does create a good social network, what could they do to tempt users away from Facebook? My advice would be to go a bit unconventional. Create a good general purpose network and add Meetup.com, which doesn't get a lot of press despite being a GREAT site. Or, perhaps they should buy Fring & let people create their own social networks.