Jeremy is always asking the right questions. He notes in his blog today:
Yahoo Groups can serve as the collaborative (not just communications) platform for bringing people together in interesting ways…
Yes it can, though it needs to take some lessons from Myspace, which I'd argue is by far the world's BEST crappy-looking website and BEST example of a site that understands the simple and often unexpected needs and desires of a .com community. The remarkable rise of Myspace should demonstrate that people are FAR more important than the application. Also that MOST people will express themselves in what most savvy web folks would consider to be very unprofessional, sloppy, offensive, obnoxious, rule breaking and bandwidth breaking ways.
Yahoo wouldn't have to have such a messy environment to succeed, I'd think all they'd need is better integration with the inspired but largely unused Yahoo 360, easier signups, and perhaps most importantly ways for people to import data into their profiles at other services to avoid the tedious chores of uploading pix and rewriting bios.
Yahoo – "If you build it, they will come … if they can get in very easily"
