Yahoo Inc. is preparing to introduce a new service that blends several of its website"s popular features with two of the Internet"s fastest growing activities — blogging and social networking. The hybrid service, called "Yahoo 360," won"t be available until March 29, but the Sunnyvale-based company decided to announce the product late Tuesday after details were leaked to news outlets.
Yahoo is testing the service with a small group of employees, some of whom have been working on the project since last year when the product was operating under the code name "Mingle." The service is designed to enable Yahoo"s 165 million registered users to pull content from the website"s discussion groups, on-line photo albums and review section to plug into their own Web logs, or blogs, the Internet shorthand used to describe on-line personal journals.