I’m was messing around *a little* with Yahoo!’s excellent social networking application “Yahoo 360”, wondering why it’s not more popular and why I’m not spending more time with it. They are of course related, since widespread adoption is going to justify more of a committment from me and until I see that happening I can’t “afford” to spend time building up contacts and 360 groups only to find nobody else is using it.    I had a similar experience with LinkedIn which is also very good but seems narrowly focused more on those who are looking for work, hiring people, etc rather than lazy pseudo-tech bums like me who are happy where we are.

I’d like to keep up with Jeff Clavier and the Silicon Valley Search SIG group, but the 360 group is not active at 360…yet.   I do think Yahoo’s built a great environment for virtual biz “meetings” and it may spring to life.  It’s totally understandable that the SIG is not using this much –  they also would need to see a “critical mass” of interest and commitment to become more involved.

In terms of utility Yahoo 360 seems to be in what I’d think would be a sweet spot – somewhere between Myspace’s legions of ranting teenagers and LinkedIn’s almost elitist business formality and (at least for now) narrow focus on technology workers.

I don’t spend much time on any single application – even my own sites which really need the TLC not to mention major overhauling, but to me 360 is really getting close to the right social networking environment if it had widespread adoption.