Integration = Acceleration

Though integration often sacrifices flexibility, integration creates ease-of-use -- and ease-of-use is key to accelerated adoption.

Microsoft's Mike Torres claims that MSN Spaces signed up more people in the past few days than existed in the first five years of the blogosphere.

Yahoo! 360º will no doubt have a similar effect once it goes public. The effect will be felt even more strongly here in the Philippines, where most online Filipinos use Yahoo! Messenger as their primary chat client.

While MSN Spaces has trackbacks and customization over Yahoo! 360º, the latter offers two things the former does not: integrated social networking, and (soon) the ability to receive RSS feeds as input for content posts. If MSN doesn't implement similar features, they could lose social networking mavens and existing hardcore bloggers to Yahoo!