My rating of Yahoo! Bix: 8.1 / 10
For people who haven’t been following news about Yahoo!, you surely must not have heard of their new acquisition Bix. Well, neither had I actually – came across this in a link on the Yahoo! Mail Blog. If you’re wondering what Bix is, in its own words, it’s a place ‘to create, enter, and judge online events’. Basically, it lets you create poll-type showdowns where people can vote and comment on contentious topics like say, ‘Which Harry Potter movie character is better?; or whatever you like. Some are more serious, like ‘Vote the icon to be used for Yahoo! Green’.
It’s a nice looking site, although slow to load on the first visit because of all that eye-candy. It’s definitely not meant to replace the snap polls on sites, oh no, that’s not what they’re targeting. Bix is an attempt at mixing social networking with pure waste of time voting for nonsense questions. But hell, it’s fun to vote for ‘Which Liam character on Yahoo! Mail is your favourite?’.
Yahoo! seems to be taking social networking pretty seriously, and they’re buying pretty cool services, like Jumpcut, del.icio.us, and Flickr for example. Until the next post, you can waste some time on voting the ‘Top 200 Star Wars Characters‘.