Following the success of MSN’s Spaces, Yahoo has announced its own plans for a blog service called Yahoo 360. The service will not be available to testers until March 29. Yahoo is reported to start with a few testers and have them invite their friends, similar to the method Google used in their Gmail beta. Also, MSN has joined Google and Yahoo with paid listings for websites called the MSN Ad Center. They will start with a search tool and in the future may use banners ads.
Speaking of MSN, it seems their online image is not well received by the public. Although there has been several new and cool services released by MSN of late, the reception they received has not been the best. According to Betanews,
In order to understand and fix the problem, MSN’s Torres asked for opinions from users. “Honestly? MSN dumbs things down,” one reply read. “There’s the fact that I can’t find anything. I’ve been using MSN for years, and there are still things I don’t know MSN does.” Another user complained of MSN’s dropping of free Outlook access to Hotmail accounts, which he said was handled poorly and looked as if Microsoft was trying to make money by pushing users to its Outlook Live program. “It was instantly perceived as ‘MS is forcing free accounts to paid ones’,” he wrote.
Torres is hopeful people will once again be excited by MSN’s services and admits that, right now, MSN is only “pretty good.” The company is already testing what it calls “incubation projects” to bring back the buzz, including a personalized Start page that serves as an aggregator of content from user-defined RSS feeds.