ReadWriteWeb

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.

"Hi, my name is MrCucumber69, I have a gray blob for a face and that's all I care to share about myself - will you be my friend?" Silly as that sounds, this is the way users of many social web applications greet each other. It's not very useful or inspiring.

Communication works better when you have a good idea who it is you're talking to. How can new online services get users to describe themselves, though?

Blogs just got a whole new audience: the casual reader. There has been some concern as of late that mainstream web users don't really read blogs, but a new Facebook app called "Blog Networks" aims to change that. The easiest way to describe this app is by calling it MyBlogLog for Facebook (as the headline says), but besides the ability to build a community around your blog, the two apps are rather different. If anything, Blog Networks may have the power to reach an entirely different demographic than MyBlogLog, whose community made up of a lot of blog owners and serious blog readers. The Facebook app, on the other hand, will appeal to casual readers by providing them with an easy-to-use blog directory and a simplified feed reader.

Blog-centric social network MyBlogLog, which just a few weeks ago added lifestreaming to their app, is today launching a new feature that aggregates lifestreams across the network by topic. The streams are presented in reverse chronological order. It feels a little like Technorati's ill-conceived Topics feature, but for all user activity rather than strictly blog posts.

Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog is stepping into dangerous waters with a new experiment in mobile presence tracking through Bluetooth.

Demonstrated at the eTech conference today, m.mybloglog.com says it allows users to: "Bind your Bluetooth address to your MyBlogLog account and discover others nearby and [sic] find out if you have any shared interests. Meetspace keeps track of time spent with others so you have a running log of people to meet and things to talk about."

Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog flipped the switch tonight on a major overhaul of user profile pages and now integrates activity data from other services around the web.

Less than a week after a small investment in the ex-Googler founded FriendFeed put lifestreaming on a lot of peoples' maps - the entry of a Yahoo! property could be a game changer in a market full of startups.

MyBlogLog is a powerful application for learning more about any blog's readership but with the release of an API last month, we knew this Yahoo! owned service was only going to get cooler. Kent Brewster at Yahoo! has hit a home run with BlogJuice, a javascript bookmarklet that uses MyBlogLog and YahooPipes to quickly display any information available on other sites about recent readers of a blog you're visiting.

I regularly check the MyBlogLog widget on a new blog I discover to see if I recognize the faces of other recent readers, as a way to get a feel for the site's community. BlogJuice takes that practice and amplifies its usefulness by orders of magnitude.

If you could capture and use the names, ages, genders and demonstrated interests of the specific people who visited your website - would you? A whole lot of people providing services online would. While we've covered the movement for standards-based Data Portability a lot here lately, the newly announced MyBlogLog API is an alternative path to similar ends being taken by a proprietary company. Announced last week just before the Yahoo! OpenID announcement, the MyBlogLog API could end up being of even greater importance. Really.