Yahoo! 360 continues to be the big story, and there's no telling how big it will be. The main issue now, in my experience, is sporadic slowness and stalling. The site is probably scaling outward rapidly, as all members own an unlimited number of invitations.

Two brilliant touches make Yahoo! 360 attractive—compelling, even. The first is the content-pushing quality of a friends network. When you add content (a blog entry or a local review, for example) that content is surfaced on the screens of your friends. Blog entries appear on their 360 home pages, and local reviews appear at the top of their local searches. But all this is configurable, which is the second brilliant touch and saves 360 from being an indiscriminate, friendship-damaging mess. All friends can be sorted into categories, and those categories can be set to receive or not receive certain content.

Another crucial privacy feature that shouldn't go unremarked upon is that adding friends does not entangle those people with each other as they are entangled with you. Let's say you've got two friends, one of whom is reserved and shy, the other of whom is an expletive-spouting loudmouth. You like them both and want their content to appear on your pages. But you don't want to push your raucous friend's extreme utterances to your quiet friend's screen. they are not.

The pushed quality of 360 content management is what Randy Farmer at Yahoo! calls the me-centric interface, as opposed to the traditional we-centric interface of social networks.