I’m rather intrigued – and confused – by Yahoo’s newly unveiled Yahoo 360 personal information service (in beta). It’s been getting considerable buzz. I’d like to try it out.
However, where exactly is it?
OK, here’s a little PR 101: When you debut a new online site or service, make sure your site (especially the home page) is definitely up and running before and during the buzz…
I’m serious. Currently, the Yahoo 360 home page yields a page not found error. This may be a temporary problem, but reading around the blogosphere (John Battelle, Dave Winer) it seems that this problem has been going on for at least a little while.
I understand that Yahoo 360, like Google Gmail, is an invitation-only service. (And yes, I’d like a Yahoo 360 invitation, please – e-mail me if you have one to share.) So perhaps people who get those magical invitations don’t get the home page error, I don’t know.
I can access at least one Yahoo 360 profile – that of Randy Farmer, head of Yahoo’s community projects team.
Still, it seems like a pretty high-profile gaffe, even if it’s only temporary. Let this go down as a “D’oh!” moment in the annals of online media.
I’ll comment over on Randy Farmer’s posting about Yahoo 360 to see if he’s got some answers…
UPDATE: Yahoo’s Randy Farmer claimed in a reply to my comment on his blog that this is an “intermittent error.” Honestly, I think that’s stretching the definition of “intermittent” a bit.
Here’s what he said:
“We’ve been able to isolate this intermittent bug and are working on a fix right now. I’ll follow up here when it is fixed. Until then, some folks are reporting success if they log out of Yahoo! before attempting to access the page. We’re sorry for any inconvenience.”
OK, I just tried logging out of Yahoo as Farmer suggested, and indeed after that I was able to access the Yahoo 360 home page. I’d think a major bug like this would have been caught and fixed before they launched the publicity effort, but so be it.
…Also, many thanks to Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodney, who was kind enough to send me a Yahoo 360 invitation.
I’ve got to run off to contest a traffic ticket at the moment (wish me luck!) but I’ll be sure to explore that service sometime in the next few days and report back.
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