Mimicry is said to be the best form of flattery. But you cant be too pleased with it if it causes you a loss of revenue. Riding on twitter's phenomenal success and their own recent lack of it, Yahoo has launched its 'adaptation' of it and christened it, Meme.

Meme does manage to strike a chord. Its fresh, well designed and smooth. It has its own set of innovations and is based on a tried and tested idea. Right from the name to the interface, everything is dynamic, fun and slick. Those familiar with twitter (who isn't?) will be right at home with Meme. The underlying concept is the same. You post short messages which show up in your followers time-line and vice-versa.

Fig: Screenshot of the interface.

The primary variation from twitter is that Meme allows you to post four types of content. Text, Photo, Video and Audio. Photos can be uploaded from your hard drive but video and audio need to be hosted else where. This is for obvious storage space constraint reasons. Yes, computer storage has become cheap over the years, but it is still not cheap enough for Yahoo to allow users to upload a gazillion terabytes of audio and video content.

I found the concept of audio posting to be unique and thought provoking. All around us, internet media nonchalantly ignores the most basic form of human communication, speech. While videos and images are streamed around, the simple human voice is not paid too much attention. It will be really nice if Yahoo allows users to upload audio directly from their hard drives, or perhaps, capture from their microphones.

Fig: Audio posting interface.

Meme faces unrelenting competition it faces from the Goliath of micro-blogging, Twitter. That, added to Yahoo's recent spate of failure with social media, Meme's future is questionable. Full marks to yahoo for trying though.

Meme is currently in closed Alpha. I was sent an invite by Pallab [Thanks!] and now I do have a few invites to send out in turn. If you would like one please leave a comment here or message me on twitter.

My Meme is: http://meme.yahoo.com/shaunak