Three questions in regards to 360 shutting down, can someone clear this up for me?

Question

a) why is 360 shutting down, if it is popular and has so many users?

b) will we still be able to use non-yahoo made avatars (like mine) since my avatar pic comes from my 360? Does that mean we have to use the Y! cartoon ones?

c) What is this "Mash" i hear is taking over from 360?

Answer 1

a) They say it's to be incorporated into another program, one that is more comprehensive.  That may be what they mean about the "new" My Yahoo.  I'll go fetch the 360 rumor control link and edit this answer to include it.

b) They've promised us that our photo avatars (basically any jpeg file) will be included in the transfer.

c) Mash is not designed to take over for 360.  In fact, Mash seems to be failing in what it set out to do, which was give MySpace some competition.

Answer 2

1) Competition, bugs, and centralization. The platform of 360 has to be more flexible to allow more functionality to compete with other social networking services (like Facebook and Myspace - regardless of the target audience). Yahoo! 360 is a beta service, meaning in testing, so it's continued existence was always a shaky proposition as it never moved out of the beta phase. There were a ridiculous amount of glitches with various modules. Yahoo has a different challenge than other services as it not only does social networking, but it also tries to connect Y!360 with other Yahoo services (like Yahoo!Groups, Flickr, etc.). The connectivity hasn't been successful for the most part. Yahoo has several profiling services that basically have the same purpose (telling people about yourself), so they are trying to create one "universal profile" for users.

Yahoo! 360 is shutting down in a sense sometime within early 2008, as the new system will likely no longer be called Yahoo! 360. But the point is that there will still be a social networking service that includes built-in blogging functionality for Yahoo users (not Yahoo! Mash).

2) Yes, personal profile photos in Yahoo!360 will be transferred over. Whether you can use the pic in Yahoo! Answers still is another story. This is mentioned in the Yahoo! 360 team blog.

3) See my past answer and comment here:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

Click on the "Yahoo! 360 News" link on the upper right corner of your 360 space for the latest, accurate (meaning "official") news regarding the transition.

Answer 3

a) might just be a power overload or some thing, maybe to many users signed on at the one time or something, or your xbox 360 has a fault

b)No i think your picture should be fine it shouldn't affect that.

c) Not that i know of maybe in the late future but for the time being no.

Answer 4

It's not shutting down so much as changing to a different format to combine and replace the current different profiles that Yahoo offers. There have been rumours that Mash will be the new one that will replace 360, but that wasn't definite last I heard... You can read any updates the Yahoo team posts in the 360 product blog: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/product_360

They say they will provide tools for us to transfer our blog content, friend lists, etc to the new platform, so I'm guessing the pics will be included there. You might be able to find that info in the product blog, or you can ask them in a comment there.

Mash is a new social networking site created by Yahoo!, but from what I've heard, it's not as good as 360 and there's no blog area there yet. I haven't tried it out as last I heard, it was by invite only (an invite is easy enough to get though - just ask someone in 360 who has a Mash profile). Again, not sure whether Mash will be the replacement for 360, or something else completely...