There may once have been a time when a Yahoo! product launch, even if it is a sneak-it-out-the-back-door Beta style event, would have been a hot topic for discussion so it says a lot that many readers may not even have heard of Yahoo! Meme, their attempt to move into the world of Twitter and Tumblr. As Yahoo’s first move into proper user-generated content creation for some time (ignoring purchases and Yahoo Answers) you would think they have spent their time coming up with something worthwhile – unfortunately it’s a little difficult to avoid the feeling that this is a rushed job.

Currently Meme is only available in Portugese and that, to some extent, may justify it’s existence. Indeed, our own international PR work at LBi has taught us the value of understanding different market’s approaches to social networks. Unfortunately there does not seem to be too much to Meme beyond that. It differs from Twitter in that it lets you post text, images, MP3s and YouTube videos and it doesn’t have a limit on the length of posts, unlike Twitter’s restrictive 140 character limit. Other than that the main difference is that in order to comment on anything on Meme you re-post (an equivalent to a ‘re-tweet’ on Twitter) it on your profile and then add your thoughts, meaning other users get to see what you are reading.

These features may sound interesting but I can’t help but feel Yahoo might have missed the point. Firstly you can fairly easily post any of these types of content on Twitter already using links to third party sites, with more and more companies springing up aiming to make this as seamless as possible. Admittedly it means users have to go outside of Twitter to get the content but this has the benefit of making Twitter much easier to consume on the go and has made it very easy for almost endless third-party systems to plug in to the Twitter API. More to the point, if you want to share this type of content you are probably already doing so on Facebook or Tumblr anyway (or even a proper old-fashioned blog)! Even the re-post feature / requirement for commenting, which may be a good way to stimulate connections (as users will quickly see who other users are following), won’t take long before it starts to interfere with the difficult signal to noise ratio that Twitter itself stuggles with.

I would probably be prepared to give Meme a temporary reprieve, however, if it were not for one thing… The fact that it has launched as an invite only beta. Spot the problem? Invite only betas are a great way to carry out a controlled launch whilst you iron out teething problems / get a handling on bandwidth costs / figure out a business model / boil the kettle, provided the service doesn’t need critical mass to be useful. Gmail launched invite only – it didn’t matter because you didn’t need to know people who also used Gmail for it to be useful. Social networks on the other hand live or die by user numbers – I might use Facebook or LinkedIn because other people do, but if everyone left so would I – and if they weren’t there in the first place (because they had to be ‘invited’) I might never have joined.