How Yahoo killed MyBlogLog « TheNextWeb.com

How Yahoo killed MyBlogLog

Written on July 29, 2008 – 12:10 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor

Unbelievable, the MyBlogLog service announced another redesign of their website today! – unfortunately, again without new features. The update is followed by the updated design of their widget in February.

As many know, MyBlogLog is a blogging network, subscribed users get a “blog community” to which other registered users can subscribe to. The idea is that the community get connected to the site, and come back for further reading. The service is well known by their widget that members install on their blog, which shows the latest viewers, including name and avatar.

MyBlogLog development seems to have slowed down after the acquirement by Yahoo. The redesign is nice but quite frankly, I do not think the announcement is that exiting. The service screams for an update, as MyBlogLog did integrate the aggregation of friends in feeds, but lacks interactive implementation in the widget. Who needs MyBlogLog anyway? While MyBlogLog simply lost the chance to create a community, it seems that the service got stuck in between three better services.

Google Friend Connect does experiment with new functionality by integrating live chat’s under their Widget
Friendfeed is best in aggregating user data from different sources
CoComment allows users to follow up on their previous placed comments.

MyBlogLog had a first move advantage but never took their model to the next level. My advice: Take ‘inspiration’ from the three sites mentioned above, and focus less on the design. But for now, Alexa, seems to report that social blogging site lost half their visitor reach in just one month… Where do you think MyBlogLog is in one year?

I hope you like that post!

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About the author: Joop is an entrepreneur and blogger located in Seoul, South Korea. Read his blog here.

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9 comments/trackbacks to “How Yahoo killed MyBlogLog”

Jul 30, 2008: Marc’s Voice » Blog Archive » final July ‘08 blogging
[...] How Yahoo killed MyBlogLog [...]

By Svetlana Gladkova on Jul 29, 2008

Hm, take a look at the comment from Ian Kennedy on my post earlier (linked to from my name) - he obviously sounds like they did not really expect they would get any coverage at all for the redesign. And still bloggers see potential for new features that are very much needed and demand them while the company continues to offer us some better looks again and again.

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By Jamie Riddell on Jul 29, 2008

Yahoo just can’t get anything right. From the Delicious change already mentioned, to this and the overwhelming balls up that was Panama, they stumble while Google strides…

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By Joop Dorresteijn on Jul 29, 2008

Such a shame, I always liked Yahoo somehow… but Jamie might be right!

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By Jelle on Jul 29, 2008

Not everysite has to be the same integrater and I do like the redesign. Plus please don’t use Alexa for stats, two sources make a source. Google Trends and Compete seem stable:

http://trends.google.com/websi.....0&sa=N

http://siteanalytics.compete.c.....?metric=uv

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By Maurits on Jul 30, 2008

Isn’t this crying wolf?
Please do’nt get me wrong but I can’t be the first person to think so. I’ll try to explain:
As we all know page ranking corresponds in a way to the links you place and their of site landing probability. Thus…
I somtimes, and more and more, get the impression that part of the mechanism that ranks websites and blogs in particular is ethically negatively related to the pissing off of another site.
Yahoo will be bought, by Microsoft, Yahoo or the King of Saudi Arabia.
What then?
I say it’s crying wolf to criticize Yahoo so easily.

btw: How’s Seoul? Kim Ji Eung regards

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By Andreas Stephan on Jul 30, 2008

I still like the new design. But you are right. It seems they stopped developing the service a while ago. A long term strategy is not visible.

For those site owners that want more features for their reader community we created a widget solution called Livecommunity. The product is still pretty new, but we already allow your visitors to interact with each other directly on your site via the “Livecommunity widget” and also offer a widget similar to the “latest Visitors” Widget of myBlogLog. –>

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By Avatar on Jul 30, 2008

And i thought i was being hard on them. i am hard on them from the side of the widgets because i cover that space and because it is a service where the widgets POWER the service.

That is why is beyond my mind how can they update the core service but not the widgets…

MyBlogLog still got a chance because they are big enough, count with many big blogs using the widgets and because while the Google Friend Connect will not work everyone and got a different focus than the Recent Visitors Widget from MyBlogLog has and the fact that it still don`t launches.

But i agree. it is really sad to see MyBlogLog not doing the right things when they clearly got everything to continue improving if they wanted.

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By Friedbeef on Oct 18, 2008

Yes, I agree - it’s as it the steam has been taken out of their sails after Yahoo’s purchase… trouble getting motivated perhaps?

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