It seems like only yesterday that TechCrunch posted a premature story about Yahoo! buying MyBlogLog.
Well, now it's official and I'd like to publicly welcome the MyBlogLog team to Yahoo. In the last month or so, I've had the chance to meet and get to know the team: Todd, Eric, John, Steve, and Scott. Hopefully our time together from now on will be less of me asking questions about their infrastructure and more of me figuring out how to help with it. :-)
Guys, thanks for putting up with all the questions we tossed at you.
MyBlogLog, if you haven't seen it, is an interesting twist on blogs and social networking / identity. Blog owners (or any site owner, really) can drop a little JavaScript widget (called a "face roll") on their site and it will show the faces of the last few visitors to their site--not to mention some useful statistics behind the scenes. As a reader, you can sign up for a MyBlogLog account, customize your profile, and join the communities that are forming around your favorite blogs and sites. In essence, it's a social network for the web that can be layered onto any site in a matter of minutes.
It doesn't take long to get used to seeing your own face appear when you visit your favorite sites. (I've added the face roll to the right side of my blog--scroll down a bit.)
MyBlogLog is one of those things that, in retrospect, seems obvious and simple. But at the same time, it's the first time and anyone has done this well and we think that's pretty powerful.
Without disclosing anyone's plans for world domination, our goal for MyBlogLog is to help it to grow as fast as it can while adding a ton of useful features.
Welcome aboard, guys. 2007 is going to be a fun year!
Thanks to Fred Wilson for his repeated writings about MyBlogLog. He's got a good eye for this stuff and some excellent ideas. :-)
Other thoughts and coverage:
- Matt McAlister
- Forbes
- Chad Dickerson on the Yahoo! Corporate blog
- TechCruch
- MyBlogLog Blog (say that 10 time fast)
- MyBlogLog Joins YDN! (Yahoo! Developer Network)
- Om Malik
- MyBlogLog Turns 'purple'
- MyBlogLog and Yahoo light up the blogosphere (Bradley Horowitz)
Posted by jzawodn at January 08, 2007 09:30 PM
I think MyBlogLog is going to pull a Flickr, and it's going to turn out that their cool thing is the social networking widget. Their stats are inferior to other free packages--Performancing (gone south, sadly) and Feedburner, to name too. However, their little face thingy is kicking five kinds of ass.
Yes, I just spelled the word 'two' incorrectly. Please discount my opinion on the basis that I can't spell at a grade one level.
Hahaha.
I happen to agree with you. The face thingy is kicking five kinds of ass. :-)
Mybloglog rocks! Looking forward to seeing more and more integration across the web.
Just don't move Rafer to the PR dept, k? lol. great acquisition though, I refer to MyBlogLog regularly in the startup I'm working at now - what a great example of a social value-add to incentivize user submission of traffic demographics. a model and inspiration. I hope Rafer"s other projects thrive too - esp Mashery, another great project.
One problem with this is that aggregators make for reading at a distance, so now the user is faced with convenience (reading in the comfort of their own aggregator), or with being seen.
I use bloglines, but I'd switch to Yahoo if it could make a good aggregator. It could then count a visit via the aggregator as a visit to the blog.
Until then, I'll just leave my bot running which "visits" me to high-profile blogs every few minutes, to keep my face out there. (Just joking, of course, but you know that if there aren't a dozen open-source solutions for this already, there will be soon)-:
If you want to get a quick demo of what MyBlogLog is all about there is a screencast of it here: http://screeniac.com/2006/10/22/mybloglogcom/
It is indeed a cool little service. Hopefully with Yahoo!'s infrastructure it won't see the growing pains that are so common these days.
Disclaimer: My sister did the screencast listed above. But I swear, this is just meant to be a helpful pointer under excessive coincidence.
I just logged out of MyBlogLog and I'm surprised that there isn't more discussions on the privacy implications. I don't normally consider myself a big privacy freak, but I really don't like the idea that anyone can know that I visited their website just by inserting a little javascript on their site.
Dustin:
What's the surprise, exactly? It's not like anyone is trying to hide what the service is about...
Greanted, it's not for everyone. But a lot of people sure do enjoy it.
After finding MyBlogLog just last week, I quickly was absorbed in the visibility potential. My measly little blog saw a dramatic up tick in traffic and I discovered a number of others who were interested in similar topics.
I got to thinking how Y! 360 could benefit from something akin to this and could be built in using Y! Avatars no less. It could really give 360 the kick it needs.
As for privacy, there's been times when I wanted to wander anonymously to some sites and MyBlogLog pages. It was easy to simply log out and do it. Much like blocking one's phone number for caller ID purposes if needed.
Good on whoever at Yahoo! decided on doing this.
Surprised was probably the wrong word because you are right that they aren't hiding anything...
But before I continue... I just noticed that even AFTER logging out of MyBlogLog, your site still knew I visited! (I'm "tyr" in their system!). What's up with that! I assumed that after logging out I could travel the web without MyBlogLog tracking me, but apparently not. I just checked on two different blogs with "Recent Readers" and both also show that I was their most recent visitor, thus confirming that MyBlogLog is still tracking my movements even after logging out! I digress...
Let's assume that Yahoo has only noble intentions... I'd still be worried that spammers would use this to identify me, my blog, my email, and/or my email by simply adding some javascript to their site. I wrote about a funny porn issue I was having with the site in this blog post: http://www.raincityguide.com/2006/12/30/is-mybloglog-good-social-networking-porn/, but do MyBlogLog users really want porn sites to know when they are visiting? It's one thing when Yahoo, Google, AOL can track us and probably figure out who we are, but why give up that anonymity to potentially any site on the web? Especially when your name, email, website, etc are often attached to your MyBlogLog account.
Most of us probably have nothing to be afraid of. We've probably never clicked on any links that were illegal or go to any sites that we wouldn't want others to know about... Nonetheless, I choose to log out. Now if MyBlogLog respected that and stopped tracking me!
Let's just hope Sexoteric or Erosblog don't start using this.
Brilliant aquisition by Yahoo. In a "good" way MyBlogLog Myspacifies regular blogs. I really do mean that as a compliment.
Now that you are on board Jeremy could you get them to hurry up with the widget for WordPress hosted blogs?
Flickr + any blog + mybloglog + yahoo promo power + revenue sharing with publishers = better than facebook.
Make it happen Yahoo!
Congratulations to Yahoo for acquiring MyblogLog, as it would now provide around 25% of our visitors, where otherwise we could rarely find visitors from Yahoo.
Though MyBlogLog is addictive, it was prone to be sold as if masterpiece is created, just to be sold. Otherwise it would have had strong business model behind it. I could expect this as it comes into the hands of Yahoo.
When Yahoo takes MyBogLog, our small problems become big issues. Like for the identity issues discussed in other comments, I usually have other browser in which I am not visible.
People are doing so many things, many of them comes under spam for building their community or to increase traffic at their blog/website. Now under Yahoo, I think more of such things, which could really spoil the mood.
Still Yahoo is known to be most strict for Spam, and as whole team of MyBlogLog has joined Yahoo would keep the whole sprit as Lively much better.
And can anybody tell why Google was never interested in MyBlogLog.
Anyone else sick of the "linkbuilding" spammers now utilizing mybloglog to generate exposure for thier own shitty little blogs? I've developed this as my standard reply to them:
############
Dude, what you call “exposure”, most of us call “spamming”. Congrats on being the lowest type of Internet critter this side of whomever Chris Hanson is talking to in some 12 year old girl’s kitchen.
############
Hanson, for the cave dwellers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hansen
I must say I definetly like mybloglog. It gives you outside of your blog community - I am member of http://www.soulcast.com - a web 2.0 experience.
So far blogs just had it implemented in their own blogs, with mybloglog it´s webwide.
