I was lucky enough to get an invitation on Yahoo Meme. When I first heard of Meme, I said in my mind “oh no, not another twitter clone”. What would be the use of another twitter alike service called Meme? However, I didn’t want to start off with rude words so I gave it a try.

Since this is currently a beta service, you can not sign up freely, you need an invite. Once you get in, you may notice some minor bugs, nothing major anyway. Actually, this Yahoo Meme is interesting and seems to be pretty good. In comparison to twitter, it lacks the search function but it has some interesting features like letting you to add an image to your update, a video or even a song. With twitter you can’t do this, you can only share links to the videos, pictures or songs you liked.

When I said that Meme lacks the search function, some may argue with me. Yes, it does have one but it will only let you search for people and not for updates.

It pretty much looks like twitter:

… so I guess that’s why most of you got irritated.

Bugs and things I don’t like about Yahoo Meme

• It lacks the search function for updates (already mentioned)
• It won’t let you add a custom background (maybe this will change in the future and I am sure it will because it’s common sense that sharing only 5 templates with millions of potential users is not a winner solution).
• I spotted a bug. It didn’t let me post a song. I tried with 3 different links, 3 different songs, nothing worked. I’m sure this will be fixed too.
• This isn’t very important but I didn’t like that it was a must to use the yahoo e-mail for signing up and receiving updates and stuff. I would have preferred gmail instead.

Conclusion

Surprisingly, I believe that this Meme thing has potential. Can it become a competitor for twitter? Yes! The simple and quick interface, neat design and the new functions, they all help.

If you already have an account there, don’t forget to follow me http://meme.yahoo.com/shocs/ .

Do you need an invite?

I have 5 invites left, so I am willing to give to my readers. All you need to do is to retweet this post and submit a comment to this article with your yahoo e-mail and retweet link.

I don’t know if you noticed, but I have recently made an account at twitter: http://twitter.com/alextips.com . Twitter is an extraordinary tool for so called “micro-blogging”, you know .. you can’t just blog everything on a normal blog, I can’t say here what I am doing, because this is a blogging tips blog so I don’t want to tell you what I ate and so on. But on twitter I can do that, actually most of the members do that!

Ok, so you have an account at twitter, a blog, and you want to have your twitter updates in your sidebar. This is an easy step but at first sight it may seem to bevery complicated. Many people have so complicated methods, here is the simplest one. I don’t know if you knew that a “twitter widget” exists.

The plugin I am talking about can be downloaded from here. Download it, upload it in the “plugins” folder on your ftp and then activated it on your blog. At “presentation - > widgets” you will notice the “Twitter” widget. Drag it to your sidebar. It should look like this when clicking at the right side of it:

As you can see, at the account you should enter only the account’s name, at title enter whatever you want, and and then choose how many updates to appear on your sidebar.