Technology As Innovator

Hi Everyone,I want to share with you some news from Vietnam. Yahoo! unveiled several Vietnam-centric initiatives as part of our Southeast Asia business strategy. One of these initiatives is called 360plus - A new Vietnamese blogging application.This offering provides Yahoo! users in Vietnam with more ways to customize their blogs, connect to friends and share their experiences with their social connections.

Just to be clear, the 360plus product is specific to the Vietnamese market and it is not the new universal profile that we have mentioned previously in this blog. So, while 360 is transitioning to the new profile for users worldwide, the 360 name will live on in a different product in Vietnam.

On a related note, many of you have asked for an update on the new profile. We are working on an update and will post it to this blog this week.

So, goodbye for now — or as they say in Vietnam, tạm biệt!

Matt Warburton

Yahoo! Community Manager

Source: Yahoo! 360 Product Blog

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Comment: Yahoo! has supported Open ID. It is reasonable to predict that the new product namely Yahoo! Profile to replace 360 will employ Open ID.

VNExpress.net, Vietnam’s top online newspaper has a new interface. This new interface is a leap from the traditional 3-columned layout of news site.

Advantages:

• Utilize 1024 width of monitor
• Better information organization

Additional, a glossy design of web 2.0 has also been applied.

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I have the impression that this new layout and design is inspired by the new interface of BBC. Moreover, this new layout is harder to read since the main column is on the far left of the monitor instead of in the middle view as previously.

VNExpress hasn’t provided personalized homepage. Possibly, this poses an investment too large for the return since the need for customization and interaction with information in the majority of Vietnamese readers is not significant.

YouTube has introduced a new player.

One new important feature is provided: Jump to any part of the video even if it isn’t fully loaded.

It’s worth mentioning recent features that’ve been added:

1. Embed code is given right on the video by clicking at Menu button.
2. Social-networking share code for MySpace, Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, StumbleUpon, Live Spaces, Mixx.
3. Statistics on video like that of a website.
4. 10 related videos on the dock of the video.