ReadWriteWeb

Blog community and data widget service MyBlogLog, acquired by Yahoo 4 years ago last month, will finally be put to rest by its parent company on May 24th, according to an email announcement sent this morning. ReadWriteWeb first reported that the service was on the chopping block in December 2009.

MyBlogLog was a service with incredible potential that was ahead of its time. It was like Facebook Connect, years before Facebook Connect. It was squandered by Yahoo. It's tragic. Below, an excerpt of our coverage of the service's pending demise a year ago, trying to capture the value it could have delivered.

People all over the geek-o-sphere are mourning the loss of social bookmarking service Delicious, which Yahoo! announced internally today will soon be shut down. Delicious wasn't the only acquired startup service the company admitted it was going to drown in a well like an unwanted kitten, though.

Yahoo's excellent location sharing clearinghouse Fire Eagle, the social events calendar Upcoming.org and the innovative browser music player FoxyTunes will all be merged into other products, but at least they'll live. Due to die: MyBlogLog. Let's take a moment to appreciate what MyBlogLog could have been; it captured and made available so much data about the social web that it could have been the most important of all those services.

Five years to the month after it was founded, cross-blog social networking widget MyBlogLog will be closed down by Yahoo! in January, we're hearing from sources close to the project. MyBlogLog is a service that shows blog writers and readers the faces and profile information of other MyBlogLog users that visit their sites.

After successfully selling MyBlogLog to Yahoo, it was surprising to see Lookery founder Scott Rafer write a blog post announcing his company's "orderly shutdown". In heartbreaking detail he took full responsibility for the company's demise saying, "In chronological order, the sins Lookery committed under my leadership were continuing our dependency on a large partner, not knowing when to cut bait on a failing asset, and building ahead of the market." While Rafer is still advising half a dozen startups and API management company Mashery continues to thrive, the loss of Lookery has taught the entrepreneur some hard lessons.

Personal recommendations of targeted content are something almost every publisher would like to offer their site visitors. It's hard though, to know who those visitors are and what they really like. That task just got easier today with the release of a WordPress plug-in called "Just for You," built by the team at Yahoo's MyBlogLog.

MyBlogLog has more personal information about millions of blog readers than any other system we know, it's ripe for offering this kind of service and we're excited to see it come to fruition.