Yahoo! 360° has been a great means to enable the average Joe (read, not a programmer) to maintain a functional blog and easily link to their photos, reviews of local businesses to share with friends, etc. Noticeably absent from the mix is the ability to share music. Oh sure, you could add the names of favorite artists and songs to your "Lists" but that's so 1990's. What's been begged for is what we have seen at MySpace and other sites that let you embed video hosted elsewhere to your blog/page.

Today Yahoo! Video broke out of its cocoon and revealed a full-fledged video search and hosting source, also providing embed source code to use in locating Y! Video hosted movies on your website. This got me thinking (hey, stop laughing). I remembered seeing an embedded video on Ernie H's Y! 360 blog. What the heck!?! I went and looked and sure enough. There's YouTube hosted video embedded here and here.

So I quickly fire up my Y! 360 blog testing grounds and try to post the provided embed code for a video from Y! Video. Nothin. Nada. Zero. I notice the provided code uses apostrophes where you'd expect quotes so I changed them. Still nothing. I poach the code to embed the YouTube content exactly as it appears in Ernie's blog. Still nothing. Grrrrr...

Then I see Neal has posted using a video too. Grrrr...

Then I get the real poop from Ernie's first embedded video post. He points out, "And oh yeah, unfortunatelly you can't embed YouTube videos yet if you don't directly work at Yahoo!. We're looking into ways we can let the public do it safely..."

Meh. Is this good for user morale? Maybe this is how the Yahoo! 360° Team is treated in the Yahoo! cafeteria (no soup for you! but watch me eat it while you whimper) and they're just striking back at us. Yeah, I'm ticked that I just wasted a bunch of time so I'm being surly.

On the upside, you could say that the Yahoo! 360° Team certainly sees the value in this feature and are probably going to be releasing something along these lines someday.

Right? Please?

UPDATE: A release of Y! 360 rolled out after this post and it provides the ability to embed media in your blogs and blasts.