Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

As I said, Yahoo having a social networking service made no sense.  Now, they seem to finally get it, or at least enough to end the redundant, useless Yahoo 360.  It's ironic in some way that Yahoo has been creating Me2 services rather than innovating, but I blame most of that on Terry Semel, who seemed more like a waste of share holders' dollars.

Even if Yahoo shut down 360, they need to stay away from companies like Facebook.  Certainly, as Facebook slowly overtakes Myspace, what is clear to me is that these services are transient.  Once a large company takes over, they practically cease innovation and focus more on integrating their services as opposed to running as an independent service.  This is a huge strategic mistake in my opinion.  Of course, specific integration tasks such as sharing infrastructure and key information are important.  However, these companies shouldn't focus on those elements alone as it seems to me.  Instead, these companies need to push their services as if they ran the company independently and continue to push the brand of their service.

Yahoo has been terrible in this regard.  I've seen them attempt to brand some of their acquired services, but many still don't even make it to the front page.  How can companies attempt to utilize the Yahoo brand name, unless Yahoo is able to market their acquired services properly?

Anyway, this said I hope Yahoo continues to go through their portfolio and slice out their redundant services.  Also, I hope they utilize their information rather than generate more subsites that provide little add value functionality.  And I hope that they stop acquiring for the sake of just investor appeasement.  Focus internally and make us something better, stop being redundant.