Many of us have been wondering if, or really when, someone would try to compete head to head with Twitter. We all know of Twitter’s explosive growth and we love it and hate it, but use it. To date there has yet to be a worthy competitor. Perhaps that’s changing.
The blog world has been buzzing lately over a potential Yahoo micro-blogging service called meme. Meme (rhymes with cream) is defined by the New Oxford American Dictionary as follows.
An element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation. It’s origin is Greek: mimèma “that which is imitated.”
A fitting reference if indeed Yahoo is copying Twitter. I went to meme.yahoo.com and found this whimsical page with funny cartoon dogs.
The site invited me to provide my e-mail, which I of course did, making me think I would be invited to participate some time in the [near] future. When you navigate to the popular link you see the screen below. It appears that it will allow all manner of content to be posed. Short blogs, images, video embeds,etc. Fewer limits than Twitter which means it’s kind of a hybrid of Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. Wonder if we need that now? Or maybe it’s a stroke of genius.
The only other screen I could find was off the find link. I assume this is where the memers will be housed.
Should be interesting to watch. Was hoping Twitter’s success would spark someone or some company to have a go at it. I’ll look forward to getting my invite an checking it out.
expedientmeans.com 
Yahoo has opened up its search API and have called it BOSS. This is game changing as now many companies are integrating BOSS API and creating their own mashups based on real-time search. Yahoo meme is part of that effort. Real-time search is the big thing now and atleast 12 new start-ups have been funded in the past 3-6 months alone. I spoke on it a bit at the recent Ad:Tech panel. Real-time search is also going to be Google’s next big challenge.
We should plan for a lunch convo about it someday. Thanks!