Yahoo! 360°

Left in beta for four years, then quietly ended

Shut down
19902026

Yahoo! 360° was Yahoo's blog and profile service, launched in 2005 against MySpace and MSN Spaces. It was never taken out of beta, never officially launched, and was left to run for four years while Yahoo started and abandoned a replacement. It was huge in Vietnam, where it outlived the American version by nearly four years.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2005
  2. 29 March 2005 Launch
    360° opens, invitation only

    A blog, profile and photo service aimed at MySpace and MSN Spaces.

  3. 24 June 2005 Launch
    Open to all Yahoo users over 18

    Eight countries, including Vietnam, where it becomes dominant.

  4. 2007
  5. 23 October 2007 Shutdown announced
    Yang decides to end it

    TechCrunch reports the decision under a headline saying nobody noticed.

  6. 2008
  7. 2008 Decline
    Development stops

    Yahoo starts and abandons a replacement called Mash.

  8. 2009
  9. 13 July 2009 Shutdown
    The American service closes

    Four years old, still officially in beta.

  10. 2013
  11. 17 January 2013 Shutdown
    Yahoo! Blog Vietnam closes

    The Vietnamese successor outlives the original by nearly four years.

The site through time

Browse 360.yahoo.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Yahoo! 2005–2009 Founded Never taken out of beta

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Yahoo stopped developing 360° in 2008 without ever taking it out of beta, and closed the service on 13 July 2009. The separate Vietnamese version outlived it and was not shut until January 2013.

Our analysis: Yahoo built 360° at the same time as MySpace and Spaces, then never finished it. It stayed in beta, a replacement called Yahoo Mash was started and abandoned before 360° was even closed, and users worked out from the silence that nobody was coming.

History [edit]

Invitation only, then never finished

Yahoo! 360° opened on 29 March 2005 as an invitation-only beta, and went to all Yahoo users over 18 on 24 June in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan and Vietnam. You got a personal page, a blog, lists, photos from Yahoo Photos, and a feed summarising what your friends had posted.

For a moment it was competitive. Then it simply stopped. Between September 2006 and September 2007 American traffic fell by more than half, while Yahoo started a replacement called Mash, opened it in beta, and shut that down too before 360° was closed.

In October 2007 TechCrunch reported that Jerry Yang had decided to end it, under a headline noting that nobody had noticed. The service ran for another twenty months anyway.

Vietnam

Outside the United States the picture was completely different. In Vietnam, Yahoo 360° was the dominant social platform, in a way that has no American equivalent. When the global service wound down, Yahoo built a separate Vietnamese product, Yahoo! 360° Plus, launched in 2008, later renamed Yahoo! Blog.

That version was not shut down until 17 January 2013, with a migration tool that let users export to WordPress, Blogger or the local Zing Blog. For a generation of Vietnamese internet users, this, and not Facebook, was the first place they wrote in public.

Ended, not launched

The American service closed on 13 July 2009, four years after opening, still officially in beta. It is one of the few entries here that died without ever having formally launched.

Similar projects

App.net Users paid for it, and it still was not enough 2012–2017 Vox Closed at 3:20 in the afternoon, and its name sold on 2006–2010 Windows Live Spaces 30 million blogs, and Microsoft expected 1% to move 2004–2011 Open Diary Invented the comment, in 1998 1998–2014 Pownce Eighteen months, and invitations sold on eBay 2007–2008 Typepad Where the BBC and Time blogged, deleted after 22 years 2003–2025

Sources [edit]

  1. Yang Decides To Shut Down Yahoo 360, Nobody Notices TechCrunch 23 October 2007 [archived]
  2. Yahoo 360 takes spin through blogosphere CNET 29 March 2005 [archived]

Last verified: 13 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).