The MyBlogLog team has been on-site in Sunnyvale most of this week. But I forgot my camera on Wednesday, so only managed to snap a picture today of Todd and Eric on the YDN couch:
As you might imagine, their first week is a bit of a whirlwind. There is lots of paperwork to do (benefits, etc), people to meet, decisions to make, meetings to attend, and so on. And unlike other acquisitions that I've been involved with in one way or another, I'm helping out on a day to day basis now.
I must say, watching a small company become part of Yahoo is a very interesting experience. There's an impressive amount of people machinery involved behind the scenes. There's also just a lot of energy around MyBlogLog and it's getting contagious.
And that is likely the hardest thing about integrating MyBlogLog into the larger Yahoo family. There are so many possibilities, so many interested groups, so many directions things could go, and there is so much excitement around it that we have to actively work to ignore a good chunk of the shiny stuff for a while. For the next few months, we need to wear blinders and get a lot of stuff done: infrastructure, scaling, bug fixes, planned features, and hopefully a few surprises too.
There are worse problems to have, that's for sure. :-)
Posted by jzawodn at January 18, 2007 10:15 PM
Yahoo's spend in the social space is a rehash of its usual chase-the-trend-stupidly strategy.
Who is the target audience for MyBlogLog? The same seven people who waste their lives on Twitter? This isn't a leading-edge phenomena, this is just wankery for the net-addicted, and even this crowd will soon ask "why???".
Yahoo should back out of social entirely (save its mainstay audience of 40+ flashers on profiles and 360). The Yahoo brand is totally uncool, the company is better off monetizing legitimately interesting third party services via panama, providing apis, and serving up utility sites like search, finance, and news. The social spend at Yahoo is the last-gasp attempt to impose some value on the "Yahoo Network", also a completely outdated idea.
Jeremy don't ignore the shiny stuff too much. Pull a Google and simply beta test on the community as you ramp it up. Mybloglog will be explosively adopted if you can pull a Google there too and have something that pretty much "installs itself".
Influenza I think you have got it backwards. Yahoo is challenged now because their excellent Web 2.0 initiatives like mybloglog ande flickr have not made it powerfully enough into the mainstream marketing mix.
I've been assuming that like MS, the suits control too much of the place rather than the Google model (and I think the early Yahoo model) of having the developers more involved as co-marketers and testers and evangelists for their new innovations = team members in the pursuit of happy Yahoo customers.
MyBlogLog has been an important tool for not only getting traffic and socializing but also to enhance online reputation as well develops credibility. With it coming into Yahoo, it's becoming more popular and so becoming more important to marketers in increasing their influence.
When these things happen, spam starts to foil the effectiveness as well as hamper the interest of genuine people in the system
In my recent study of most popular communities proved how easily MyBlogLog can be manipulated for owns benefit.
I have done a story on my blog "The Big Steal in MyBlogLog!" on How people are influencing their communities by creating fake identities.
I expect you people will get a better innovative solution to such spams.
Divya Uttam
Hi there,
I'm Yahoo! employee as you.
This post may interest you :
http://gregorytalon.blogspot.com/2007/01/myspaces-approach-of-value-chain.html
In response to Kevin's comment he's not the flipping Jeremy the shocker. That the heavy metal sign of the devil...all hail Satan!
Well, at least the acquisition stock has nowhere to go but up.
I had never heard of MyBlogLog. I went there. Honestly, I'm not sure I needed to hear about it, but I wish the guys the best of luck.
I hadn't heard of MyBlogLog until I found it in the Yahoo! API and I signed up and gave it a go.
I'm quite disappointed by it, actually. I don't really see the point? You can see a face of someone who's visited your page so long as you inject your pages with that script; and my blog of all places, like many third party blogging services, won't even support inserting SCRIPT tags, Even Yahoo! 360 doesn't.
What's more, you sign up and you get to see a whole load of stats about... something... I didn't quite take that much notice. I was more distracted by the text that reads "This is a three day trial which will expire unless you give us some money"
I dont have or care for giving a service like this money so after the three days withdraw the code from all my pages that I'd inserted it in, and now I'm tempted to delete my profile.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm struggling to find a use for this site, and am wondering why Yahoo! have bothered purchasing it. (It looks a mess too, from a design perspective).
I'd spend more time into infiltrating Upcoming.org into more of your services and get some people using it.
Matt:
There's a technique you can use to get a faceroll on a page that doesn't allow script tags. It's not well publicized yet, but we'll fix that.
