Yahoo opens 360 to outside content

Is it fair to say that the “walled garden” concept is finally and officially dead? Yahoo tells us tonight that users of their Yahoo 360 blogging/networking service can now publish content to their personal pages from other blogging or bookmarking services, such as LiveJournal or del.icio.us, using RSS. What is more, 360 users will still be able to alert friends and family members of new content on their 360 pages, even if the content is from somewhere else.

“You’ll be able to go to LiveJournal, update a post and have your friends and family members notified of the update,” Paul Brody, senior director of community products for Yahoo, tell us. (Yahoo 360 alerts your friends and family members to your new content by sending updates to their 360 sites or via Yahoo Messenger. So recipients need to be 360 or Messenger users to get the updates.)

Brody said the change came about from listening to users of the new 360 service, which is still in beta. “Many users have created blogs on LiveJournal or Xanga or elsewhere, and we recognize that,” Brody said. “We want people to be able to have that on 360 and share it with the connections they made on 360.”

Yahoo is also integrating Flickr into 360, a widely expected move given that Yahoo now owns Flickr.