MyBlogLog Acquired by Yahoo - Grist To The Distributed Network Mill
After only 3-4 months of
general release, distributed social network MyBlogLog has been bought by
Yahoo for an estimated $10-12M. This adds to Yahoo's collection of trendy Web 2.0
apps - they can pop the MyBlogLog folks in with Flickr and del.icio.us. When MyBlogLog
initially came out in October 2006, I described it as "a kind of instant social
networking system for bloggers". What surprised me was how fast this thing took off. But
then after using it on my own blog for the last 2.5 months, I can see the attraction for
both users and Yahoo.
For bloggers, MyBlogLog lets you literally see your readers - and it's amazing how much of a difference putting a face (or icon or avatar) to a reader is. It actually makes it a real community, because you begin to recognize and know people. There's also a homepage (actually two of them - a members and a community page) at your MyBlogLog account. Personally I haven't used the statistics data that MyBlogLog collects, but that too can be beneficial for bloggers.
Note that MyBlogLog is susceptible to gaming - I was told recently that it's possible to create a small script to enable companies or blogs to repeatedly stick their 48*48 pixel brand onto your faceroll. So Yahoo needs to watch out for this type of gaming.
As of now, MyBlogLog is mainly used by techie bloggers - but that's because it's such a new product and only early adopters have jumped on it. Which brings me to the benefits for the new owners...
Of course having a MyBlogLog-branded faceroll is also of great benefit to MyBlogLog, as it it pushes their brand all over the Internet... well, the blogosphere anyway. Yahoo has recognized another addictive web 2.0 app with network effects written all over it, so its plan will be to mainstream MyBlogLog and integrate it into services like Yahoo 360 (Yahoo's blogging platform). I'm sure there are also ways to utilize MyBlogLog on Yahoo properties like Flickr and some of its content properties (Yahoo Movies, Food, etc).
As Yahoo rolls out its own distributed network platform - slowly but surely - then MyBlogLog starts to become a useful bit of glue.
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This is great. I love MyBlogLog and I'm glad it got acquired coz now it has a bigger chance of survival and growth. Their current business model is just as well thought out.
Great news..
Yes it's really very easy to cheat MyBlogLog - here is my blog entry on that subject - includes a sample cheating script :)
http://grou.ps/emresokullu.blog/?p=178
MediaVidea says MyBlog log is an innovative model for next - gen. blog networks.
http://mediavidea.blogspot.com/2007/01/mybloglog-better-model-for-blog.html
They have been around for a lot longer, but without the social aspects.
Here is a link to the original announcement of the acquisition on their blog.
http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/01/the_jig_is_up_m.html
It should also be noted that Yahoo now has an analytics package with paying customers before Microsoft.
MyBlogLog - very useful indeed.
However what is more impressive is Yahoo's aggression. Yahoo 2.0 and now this - very solid indeed........
MyBlogLog is a very cool idea, but I finally had to take it off my blog because it was causing it to load very, very slowly. I noticed this page did the same thing. What's with that?
I like MyBlogLog and have used it for several blogs. However, I noticed that it considers some urls as invalid even though they are existing valid blogs.
Thanks for the post. I'm thinking about adding it to my blog, but I am a bit concerned about the load speed issues brought up in previous comments. Hopefully the acquisition by Yahoo will improve things a bit.
MyBlogLog is much older than you suggest. It was, and still is, a simple stats package for tracking hits to external links.
Yes, I also noticed it made my page run slowly sometimes, but they seem to have fixed the problem.