Too many posts about 360? Sorry about that, but Yahoo!'s new social network platform is a big deal. I hope it becomes a bigger deal fast; with fewer than 2,500 members at the time of this entry (if a wide-open search yields an accurate result), 360 doesn't seem to be growing with the vigor I expected. Most of my invites seem to have peeked in, poked around, and peaked early (perhaps having become piqued?). I don't see a friends-of-friends network growing at a speed that would deliver critical mass anytime soon. Speaking of invitations, I was mistaken in an earlier post when I said that members get an unlimited number of invitations to distribute; in fact, members get 100 invitations. My apologies to readers who have requested them. (Go to this Yahoo! Group to give and get invitations.)

In addition to following link trails in the traditional manner, finding members who share interests and locations, you can search 360 with an engine that offers a couple of quirks. First, the proximity brain need calibration: Evidently, Barcelona and Guatemale are both within 500 miles of my northeast-US location. Second, you cannot search for members younger than 18 years of age. I didn't read the TOS carefully on the way in, and I guess that minors aren't allowed in 360. That makes sense, I suppose, but I'm still a little startled. The child-friendly simplicity of the platform's controls lured me into thinking this thing was meant to provide a family experience.

Continue to read about 360 blogging and the network's pushy quality…

The Settings pages are a real mess. Please, beta team, fix these first. And while you’re correcting the overlapping fields and eye-spasming layout, why not completely hide information set as hidden? Why, for example, does a member need to see his or her own (hidden) age on the My Page view, which presumably shows what other people see? It’s disconcerting and makes it seem as if the “hidden” feature is broken. (It’s not.) And why can’t a person’s gender be hidden? I know—for the search engine. But Yahoo! claims that 360 is for people who already know each other. Why cannot a member remain androgynous by choice?

Y!360 is closely hooked up with Yahoo! Local. The somewhat bizarre emphasis on sharing of local reviews in one indication. More fun is the morning reminder I get in 360 to find some coffee … because I once search for local coffeehouses in Yahoo! Local. That really tickles me.

Blogging could stand some development during this beta phase. You cannot make a photo link to something—unless you manually code the photo into the message boday. Also, there is no manual positioning of photos: they end up above the blog entry, which uses an unnecessary amount of vertical space. Also, text links do not show up in the My Page summary of the top blog entry—users must click to the full entry before seeing links.

The pushy quality of 360, wherein members potentially see every utterance of all their friends could become overbearing. Users have to modulate their settings if they don’t want to piss off their casual friends by pushing too much content. As the network grows and and each circle of friends becomes likely to include near-strangers, the pushiness might become a larger issue.