Guest comment: Is Yahoo’s MeMe looking in the wrong direction?

Yahoo MeMe came out of Beta last month and has proved itself a polished application. The trouble is though, it has no USP over Twitter - apart from a 2,000 character limit which I’ll come on to in a minute.

Essentially, it’s a complete mirror version of Twitter. Now even if this was the intention, surely Yahoo knew that to attract sustainable active user figures, they needed an angle, a particular target audience or product integration to set it apart. MeMe's strap line 'Share with the World What You Find Interesting' says it all.

There are parts of MeMe that I admire, like the encouragement to share pictures and videos from within the client - though increasingly fewer Twitter users actually use the client. This brings me on to another question. Will it attract developers to build the kind of 3rd party applications that have contributed to Twitter’s phenomenal growth? At this stage, I don't think so.

One of the main differences between Twitter and MeMe is the latter's 2,000 character limit for posts which places it into a grey area in the micro-blogging market. By giving users the license to write too much you potentially lose that attentiveness that all Twitter users expect when writing posts.

It's very rare these days that people have space in their web world for more than one service per vertical, which is intensified when the majority of your contacts are aligned with a particular service.

So even though MeMe is a polished and well programmed application, with its current strategy and features, it will be difficult for it to create long term success.

What could it do to target the internet's social-ites and re-align itself to a brighter future?

A couple of things come to mind:

- Integrating it fully with Flickr and Delicious, almost as an internal communication tool within the services for users to share their videos, photos, links and thoughts.

- Providing the facility for users to dynamically insert information from Yahoo sites such as weather forecasts, news snippets, videos and music would add another dimension to the service and encourage developers to take notice.

By bringing together Yahoo users from across its wide range of services, MeMe could be the catalyst for encouraging users to interact with one another, moving it away from the pressures of being a standalone product. In the same way Spotify analyzed the music market and identified a niche to exploit in the shadow of iTunes, MeMe can take advantage of the products and users it already has around it.

Changing MeMe to a Yahoo member focused communication tool could bring together the Yahoo network of products and services, increasing active members and generating a closer, passionate environment, enabling Yahoo to deliver on the  mission statement from its multimillion dollar advertising campaign...'it's all about you Y!'.

One thing’s for sure, unless Yahoo takes a long hard look in the mirror, MeMe won’t have the long term future it wishes it had.

By James Glick

Media Account Manager

CheezeDMG

www.agencydmg.com

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