Farewell MyBlogLog, You Could Have Been A Contender

So, I was looking at last December’s posts to determine if I had written a standard 2009 predictions post. Instead of finding that, I found that I had written a post regarding the blog community widgets needing to work together. It was written in response to the Google FriendConnect and Facebook Connect widgets being released and everyone trying to put these widgets on their blogs. This was a curious find given that ReadWriteWeb is reporting that Yahoo is planning to kill MyBlogLog next month. There is one short paragraph that explains a lot about the MyBlogLog story:

MyBlogLog was a wildly innovative service that grew fast after launching and was acquired in January 2007 by Yahoo! for $10 million. It made a deal with users: give us your personal information and we’ll show you the faces of people who read your blog. That was a compelling offer and the resulting data amassed could have proven invaluable, had Yahoo! chosen to cultivate it and a developer ecosystem around it. That potential was so great, in fact, that sunset for MyBlogLog is downright tragic.

In addition to the lack of development activity on MyBlogLog, the release of Google FriendConnect and Facebook Connect widgets did not give smaller players much of a chance. Most people will flock to something released by Google or Facebook. MyBlogLog was a blog widget for bloggers so it did not have the name that Google and Facebook did. Last year, I had called for Yahoo to use MyBlogLog in a similar manner:

Does anyone remember that Yahoo owns MyBlogLog? Should we expect to see Yahoo marketing the MyBlogLog widget as their answer to the Google and Facebook offerings? If Yahoo was smart, yes, they would attack this point. The MyBlogLog widget is way cooler than anything that Google and Facebook have on the table.

Over the past year, we have seen development on Google FriendConnect to make it more of a community enabler, and the same can be said for the Facebook Connect developments. Given that, and the lack of any changes on MyBlogLog, it became obsolete. Yahoo had a very interesting property and had let it rot. Now that Yahoo has ignored the benefits of MyBlogLog long enough, it has decided to lay it to rest.

There will likely be a lot of blog community widgets closing down in the next year. With Twitter widgets and the Google and Facebook offerings, they just cannot compete anymore. Now it is up to the developers to make something interesting with these widgets and find a way to enable community building on the blogs.

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8 thoughts on “Farewell MyBlogLog, You Could Have Been A Contender”

  2. Adam,

    They definitely do not make you feel confident that anything but their content properties will continue. Yahoo has had a serious lack of execution the past few years, and that can be seen in a comparison of what they offered three years and now. Many of their services have not really changed.

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  4. Mark,

    I would love to take credit for breaking this, but it comes from ReadWriteWeb which I did link to. The fact that you read it here first makes me happy though 🙂

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  7. Yahoo needs to die. That company has long since become a net liability, ruining one service after another.

    One need only Google “Flickr” and “censorship” to see what a wonderful job they’ve done in managing one of the Internet’s treasures, and Flickr has been lucky. Geocities and Jumpcut are gone. Of its own homegrown services, Yahoo has shut down Mash, before anybody even knew what it was supposed to be, Live (video feed service) before almost anybody had heard of it, Yahoo 360 – their blogging service – after managing to generate a panic and killing off its once considerable popularity, Briefcase, Photos, Auctions … and many more, I’m sure.

    It wastes its stockholder’s money on acquiring companies only to destroy them, while providing an overwhelmingly negative net social benefit to the online community, by creating a strong deterrent against putting real work into building a creative presence on any smaller site, because who knows what Yahoo’s next acquisition will be? Anybody who took this company out of the picture would be doing a great social service.

    Gates – paging Bill Gates?

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  8. Joseph

    I agree that many of their purchases have not fared well in the end. It is almost an embrace and extinguish plan, but only the most popular services survive like Flickr and Delicious.

    The disappointing part of this is the amount of interesting work appearing in the search and social spaces at Yahoo. We will probably see Yahoo focus purely on being a content portal and only continue with whatever properties are still successful.

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