Yahoo Makes A Twitter Clone…In Portuguese

We’ve heard that Yahoo may be unveiling a Twitter clone called Yahoo Meme. According to our tipster David Ruiz’s blog (it’s in Portuguese, here’s the translated version), Yahoo is inviting users to test out the alpha version of a competitor to Twitter. Translated to English, the front page of Yahoo Meme says “Do not have time nor patience for blogging? So Meme is tailored for you. Wait” Yahoo Meme’s mascot is a dog instead of the Twitter bird.

Here’s Yahoo’s description of its “meme” (translated from Portuguese):

Today, a “meme” on the Internet is popularly understood as a fever and became content that is played by everyone.

The term “meme” was created by Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene,” 1976. Dawkins and other scientists after it identified the meme as a fragment of culture or behavior that is replicated in the brain brain in a manner similar to what happens to genes in biology.

It is clear that the term “meme” as used here, is an adaptation of free and expanded its strict scientific sense, but not away from the essence of the idea.

Yahoo Meme seems to be an exact clone of Twitter. Once you attach a user name to your meme, you are allowed a description of a minimum of 100 characters. Similar to Twitter, you can search for users and follow others. You can write text and include links to photos, video, and music. Like Twitter, you are restricted to messages with only 140 characters. Ruiz writes that the search on Yahoo Meme is still limited.

Yahoo’s admiration for Twitter begun when it recently developed Sideline, an Adobe AIR-powered desktop Twitter monitoring application. Perhaps admiration turned to envy and Yahoo decided to test out its own full-fledged microblogging service? But why in Brazil? Good think we have readers there keeping on top of things.

We’ve contacted Yahoo for more details.