When it comes to social networking sites you have several options, there is the very popular MySpace, you also have Xanga, MSN Spaces and then there is Yahoo 360 - very cool name uh? Yahoo 360 is a blogging and social networking service offered by the search engine Yahoo (obviously) but if you take a good look at it you will see that there is much work to be done in order to improve this tool, for instance the look and feel of the finished product (your blog) looks a lot like MSN Spaces, the layout is somewhat messy and disorganized and the entire blogging environment is not very flexible. Compared to Wordpress, Yahoo 360 doesn’t even come close, this only takes in consideration the blogging capabilities since Wordpress is not designed to work under “just one roof”
Flexibility and Hosting Environment:
This is a big disadvantage all social networking sites have, instead of allowing the user to host his/her blog in their own servers they only have the option of hosting their blog in the provider’s servers. This “feature” comes in handy if you have millions of visitors a month because you don’t have to pay for bandwidth costs but the possibility of a single user reaching that much attention is very unlikely. Wordpress on the other hand can be hosted within Wordpress’s servers or you can download the application and host it in your own virtual server. If you choose to host it in your own server you will need some basic technical knowledge but Wordpress’s site has several tutorials and help files which will help you do whatever you want with this tool
Blog’s Aspect and Administration Area:
Yahoo 360’s blogs look a lot like MSN Spaces blogs, the layout is not very intuitive and the use of background images within the site can be very annoying, for instance if you use a small 300X300 JPG image it will repeat in X and Y which makes your blog very hard to read and it distracts visitors. There are several themes that can be applied to your site with the click of a few buttons but the amount of themes available for Wordpress is far superior. The administration area found in Yahoo 360 is very simple and allows users to write entries, upload multimedia files and customize their site’s aspect, however there isn’t access to anything technical, for instance Wordpress users have access to widgets which lets them customize the look and feel of the navigation and sidebars without having to modify the source code, Wordpress’s administration area is easy to use and very powerful as well.
Weird URL Addresses:
Yahoo 360 assigns weird looking URLs to their blogs so you will not be able to share your site’s URL address, instead you need to provide your username so that people will be able to find you, this is a clear disadvantage if we compare it to the clean sub domains provided by Wordpress’s hosted environment.
Plugins - Any?
Lastly, this is major area where Yahoo 360 simply can’t compete with Wordpress, with the thousands of plugins available for Wordpress users can expand the core capabilities immensely, the sky is the limit. When it comes to Yahoo 360 there are just a few tweaks you can do to include multimedia items in your site, however these don’t provide all the features plugins do.
So you like social networking sites uh? If so you will definitively consider Xanga as a possible blogging application and a great tool to meet new friends. Basically this application runs like MySpace where you are able to create your own profile, create a blog, insert content, pictures and videos and share them with the community, however if you are picky or technical you might want to have access to several customization tools which will allow you to change the aspect of the site, the layout and the way it behaves right? If this is the case then you obviously will want to try Wordpress which is more professional but has one downside, it is not very community oriented, this is mainly because Wordpress’s hosted environment has not been designed to make blogs and subdomains interact with each other under one main navigation system or frame, much like Xanga and MySpace do. Lets take a look at the key differences between the two.
Site Aspect and Administration Area:
Your blog’s aspect is community oriented, this doesn’t keep in mind everyone out there, users would have to create an account at Xanga in order to reply to your posts, this doesn’t happen with Wordpress since you can allow people to post to your blog without requiring a registration, however if you do require users to register at your blog first then they will be registering at your site not Xanga’s site in order to read and comment about your entries.
Much like MSN Spaces and MySpace, users are able to post messages at the end of your blog entries, if you are a professional blogger or someone who likes to keep things neatly organized then you will not like this method since new visitors and readers will not know what comment goes to what post, Xanga’s comments just like MySpace comments are stacked one on top of each other.
The administration interface is rather simple and allows you to manage your page layout by choosing many pre-made themes or skins which can be applied with the click of a button. Wordpress offers thousands of themes and is not limited to just a few hundred. With Xanga users can upload images and additional content in order to illustrate their posts - The same can be done with wordpress. Xanga’s hosted interface allows very little flexibility so users are not able to host their blogs in their own servers, they are not allowed to create custom 404 pages or use any .htaccess file which controls site behavior.
Subdirectories instead of Sub Domains:
This is a big down side to Xanga and other community oriented blogging tools which are hosted within the service provider’s servers. If a user wants to give his blog’s URL address to friends they have provide something like ” URL/username/randomNumber/indexPageName.html”, a work around this problem is to give out your username to friends who have to sign up with the site if they want to place comments and interact with you. In Wordpress you get a neat subdomain which is easy to handle and even write, for instance you would get something like yourname.wordpress.com if you want to host your blog in Wordpress’s free hosting environment, the beauty of Wordpress is that you are able to take the entire script and host it elsewhere.
Automatic Sounds and Advertisements:
This is yet one of the many disadvantages found in social sites, users normally have a huge banner or advertisement sitting on top of their blog, this makes the blog look very unprofessional, steals visitors and ruins the look of your site. In addition, Xanga allows automatic sounds to be played automatically when someone visits your site, this may annoy many of your visitors who might dislike your music interests. Adding extra multimedia items increases your page loading time which can also drive people away from it.