Portal company Yahoo! Inc has added a new kind of web community to its existing free services for loyal Yahoo users. Yahoo Clubs are designed to unite message boards, chat, email and personalization tools under a single web address. The idea is for groups to develop an electronic forum for interaction between, say, friends, relatives, fans, coworkers or investment clubs. Presumably these clubs can then be targeted for highly specific advertising. Communities may be listed at http://clubs.yahoo.com/ but Yahoo has also introduced the notion of unlisted groups, which are closed. Only the founder can let new people in to these virtual gated communities. Yahoo’s announcement is not especially well-timed: web communities are likely to lose something of their market luster in the wake of a troubled GeoCities Inc initial public offering. After a promising start, the company ran into problems with the Federal Trade Commission over alleged breaches of subscribers’ privacy (CI No 3,474). Investors punished the breach by stripping 22 percent off GeoCities’ price in only two days.
