Yahoo! looses social networking battle

For the past 4 years Yahoo! have been trying to close the gap on internet search giants Google.
Yahoo! have released many products that Google already had a strong industry foot hold in. The most successful of which is Yahoo! answers (of which i am an avid member).
On March the 25th 2005 Yahoo! launched their attempt at taking on the likes of facebook and MySpace, in the form of Yahoo! 360.

Yahoo! 360 offered users a mashed up mix of the other major industry leaders, including themes which were easily to apply much alike the skins you can get for myspace.
As well as this 360 also bundled in an API for users to develop distributable applications that profile holders can make and use, much like facebook.

Yahoo!s down fall was in the timing of the product. It was too little too late.
A model followed by many internet application giants, is to find an idea that already exists and then remake it and use all of the power and muscle behind the company to push it to the top.
Unfortunately this doesn't work if the competition is a huge organisation with the financial backing of facebook.

18 months after the original launch of the 360 website Yahoo! realised they were in way over their heads, and decided to buy as large a portion of facebook they could get their hands on.
The offer on the table was $1 billion, for a complete take over. At the last moment facebook owners dropped out of the deal leaving the Yahoo! fat cats with their trousers round their ankles.

Finally, Yahoo! decided to concede defeat after a four year uphill struggle.
The service will be terminated on the 13th July 2009, leaving users on the social networking site the mammoth task of manually porting all of the onformation stored with 360 to Yahoo!... which is a basic social network.
What are the odds that every user will finally open a facebook account, and join the 60 million (and growing) user base.

Nice try Yahoo!.... you will be sincerely missed... you where the first search engine i ever used.