August 2010 Update Since Chris wrote this brief note, we've been busy building Yahoo!'s open and social platforms, making it possible for us to aggregate users’ activities from around the Web. We hope to have an update soon about how MyBlogLog will fit within that platform.
Yesterday, rumors surfaced around Yahoo!’s imminent shutdown of its MyBlogLog service. Frankly, it’s no secret within Yahoo! that we’re actively discussing the future of MyBlogLog. However, it’s also true that we have not made any final decisions at this point. Is a shutdown on the table? Sure, that’s an option. But there are other options as well. We know this creates some uncertainty for current MyBlogLog users. While we aren't quite ready to share more details, we promise to keep you posted.
Chris Yeh, Head of YDN
37 Comments
I have to admit, I am puzzled about the idea to kill mybloglog. when bartz came on she said she wanted yahoo to focus on its business which is social networking on a grand scale. mybloglog does what she says yahoo’s focus is. I don’t know of another service like it. Now I admit, it is difficult to monetize. But, functionally, the only way i can see mybloglog being functionally gone is if the different blogs people are able to link to on mybloglog are put into the yahoo profiles update set. If you have to kill mybloglog, for money’s sake, take the blogs that people link to and use profiles updates for them. the funny thing is, i am not a user of mybloglog.
@Andy I have never received significant traffic from being a mybloglog member and have always felt the job there washalf done and abandoned. There is no members forum for discussion take place. Overall, the site has the feel of being automated, rather than being alive with members making connections and engaging in dialog that leads to relationship building. Hopefully, the rumors are wrong and Yahoo developers will enhance mybloglog rather than eliminating it.
May you have a joyful holiday season and a happy and health new year, as well. :)
Good news, it seems there’s some hope then :)
Well right now it is another peanut butter issue. The best solution is to boost the new Yahoo! profile with MyBlogLog feature and concentrate everything on one service. After all both MBLG and Y!Profile are used to concentrate various feeds so why not simply migrate users over to just one service. Just stop doing everything in double. You guys closed Y!Photos in favor of Flickr, MyWeb in favor of Delicious, now choose between MYBLG and Y!Profile
Why trying to shut down services that are running quite better than others? When it comes to blog networks, MBL is still one of the names recognized!
Yahoo has never been serious about social networking. I remember that 360 never came out of Beta…it was the red-headed step of Yahoo. Then came Mash, which was basically Facebook Lite. Then came the Profile system, which was Mash Lite…a steaming pile goo.
The problem with Yahoo is that they never seem to learn how the integrate the products they acquire. MyBlogLog was supposed to be integrated with 360, but that didn’t work. And MyBlogLog can do everything Universal Profile System can do…except better. The only thing it doesn’t have is a blog, but who would use that silly blogging tool on the profile system anyway?
Have to agree with some of the other commenters here. You guys never embraced it as we did you. it had so much potential.
Mr.Yeh, let me tell you how this looks from a user’s point of view. I’ve just invested a certain amount of time into creating communities for my blogs, linking to them, and encouraging visitors to sign up for them, if they wish to be notified of updates. That’s time out of my day that doesn’t get paid for by Yahoo with anything other than a service that you’re now telling us might get shut down really not very long after I’ve taken time to link everything together, meaning that my time might very well end up having gone to waste.
How does that make this user feel? REALLY ANGRY. Betrayed. And totally unwilling to ever try another Yahoo service if you go ahead with this, no matter what that service might be, because I’m tired of this garbage. How much of my uncompensated time got eaten up this summer because your ever so delightfully whimsical CEO decided to kill Geocities, leaving us to scramble looking for replacements, because … tee hee hee … Yahoo decided that an FTP server was one of those luxuries its users didn’t need, meaning that we had to do our downloading by hand, one file at a time? But hey, who cares? It’s not like our time is worth anything, right?
Except maybe to us. You know, those lowly users without whom Yahoo would have no content onto which to stick its advertising, outside of a few newsfeeds one can pick up elsewhere. Seriously, if all that you people are going to offer in the long run is AP feeds, then why wouldn’t visitors just go to the AP homepage or to some real news site? Why bother with Yahoo?
My own personal position – and I really, seriously doubt that it will be a unique one among your user base – is that I’m really tired of having my time put to waste because your company feels like flaking out, so tired that if you do this to us one more time – as you say you be about to – I will never submit another piece of content to another page on your server ever again, outside of those I or one of my friends moderate, and that I’ll start pushing to have those moved elsewhere. Enough is enough. Yahoo is either going to choose to be a credible hosting service or it is not.
If not, you’re going to end up with the user base you deserve, and your stock prices will reflect the change, especially after some of us write to a few of your investors and explain to them why the quality and quantity of the content on those servers has started to drop, and why advertisers are wandering off. I hope that wasn’t too vague. If it was, be sure to send a message to the corporate acquisitions office at Microsoft, and I’m sure they’ll be able to explain it to you.
This service was a disappointment. Because of its youth orientation, it never reached its potential. Worse, you tried to charge me for web analytics that others provide for free. RIP.
Why don’t you just sell it off to someone else, like Automattic (cause I remember, didn’t you sell blo.gs to them too?)
I agree MBL had some potential, but it’s been neglected for years. It doesn’t really DO anything. Sure, the stats are solid, but the rest is just pointless. Communities you can’t even post in? Ever heard of CMF Ads? They have a great forum. BlogCatalog has a better widget. Even BC has forums. The MBL widget is just another script to dump in your sidebar and forget about.
Why would you ‘close down’ or ‘shutdown’ MyBlogLog? I don’t think there is any reason to terminate this service competely, if you don’t have any use for it I would run it on my servers, just let me know :)
“It doesn’t really DO anything.”
Sure it does. It ties all of one’s content, no matter where be has posted it, into one tidy, easy to follow bundle. It provides an easy way for users to be notified of new posts in the locations which they find to be of interest.
“The MBL widget is just another script to dump in your sidebar and forget about.”
Which is what I think it should be – a convenient, labor saving tool that does what it is supposed to do, with a minimum of effort and drama for the user. Not everything needs to be a chance for somebody to post. If I wanted my blog to have a guestbook, I could easily give it one. What I don’t like about Blogcatalog, among other things, is that using it effectively forces me to give my blog a guestbook, one without comment screening, whether I want one or not.
Is there some kind of weird swear word screening program in use on this page? I ask, because I typed
“It ties all of o n e ‘ s content, no matter where o n e has posted it”
(spaces introduced by me in an attempt to prevent a repeat of what just happened) and got
“It ties all of o n e ‘ s content, no matter where be has posted it,”
That’s not cool, and this is not the first time I’ve found myself unpleasantly surprised in this manner, on this very page. What o n e types is what should end up being seen by those reading o n e ‘ s comment.
I am getting sick of Yahoo! decimating itself. What on earth is wrong with you guys? You’ve got a perfectly good thing going in MBL. With all the trumpeting that Yahoo! will be rewired with a social networking outlook, MBL seems to be well prepared for just that direction. You have wonderful products, but you just don’t know how to tell the ‘average’ Yahoo! user of its presence. Why don’t you do a poll to see how many of your visitors even know of MBL? I would be surprised if it’s more than 0.1%.
Please allow your products some homepage hogging, publicize them and then see what people do with them. I have used the MBL widget on my blog for years and find it indispensable for roping in all my Net activities. I suspect as the social networking phenomenon begins to rule the roost, so will MBL, but if only Yahoo! knows how to project it.
Speaking to the point, this service is on the death row right ?
But frankly, most of the users in MBL doesn’t look like blogger. At least, their profile is empty, while their activities are filled with only friends-adding frenzy instead of any meaningful contents.
Is or is not MyBlogLog continuing? Please let us know, and if it is, give us time to make arrangements with our community members.
I meant if you are closing MyBlogLog, please give us time to let our blog’s community members know how to stay in touch.
(I am nearly incoherent with anxiety and prospective grief!)
For years MyBlogLog has been “the” blog directory community along with Blog Catalog. I only heard about MyBlogLog being in peril from Andy Beard who is always on top of important news. Thankfully I have always used both in large part because of Andy.
I highly recommend that current MyBlogLog users get active at Blog Catalog in case the worst happens and we lose MyBlogLog forever. I hope Yahoo! is at least kind enough to publish this comment so bloggers won’t lose touch with the communities they have already built. I suspect that is unlikely though.
Perhaps absorbing and neglecting acquisitions until they pull the plug is actually the master plan.
I have read about a dozen blogs in regards to Yahoo shutting down OTHER key services. Their tech support on their PPC advertising leaves something to be desired. Their search engine comes up short and even adding links to Yahoo Search can take months after Google. I know this as I date every entry. It seems to me that everytime I/we join something FREE, it gets yanked. I just now HEARD of MBL from a Blog Catalog post, so I tried, now i see all this, and spent an hour setting it up, now i read this news of it being on death row. So far my Yahoo experience over the past five years is something on the scale of a -1.
waddya mean closing it down ?! what a daft idea why ? mybloglog is the closest thing to a social network for bloggers there is on-line – blogcatalog isn’t Yahoo, the Yahoo brand makes it interesting – you could make it a paid service $5.00 a month entry fee to use it per person or per blog – whatever.
I think MyBlogLog has lots of promise!! Yahoo! should simply better integrate it on their platform and position it better against Facebook, twitter, google buzz by plastering MyBlogLog all over Yahoo! Meme, Yahoo! buzz etc….
Talking about missed opportunities… this is one!
Hi guys nearly March already, any news on if this platform is closing down or not ?
Thanks for your concerns. We’re working on our plans still and will provide a detailed blog post as soon as we have concrete details to share.
cheers for the feedback, Robyn, I will sit here and wait for good news in my virtual chair, on this blog! – ‘They’ could team up with Networkedblogs on Facebook creating an even BIGGER blogging network!
I hope MyBlogLog stays on line. Why fix something that is not broken? Keep up the good work. This site is a chance for bloggers such as myself to get to know more about blogging. There sure is a lot to learn. We can also network with other bloggers here. What’s not to like? Take care, Cindy Makonin http://www.iwillgrowrich.com
Well… I’m ready to get started! Don’t quit on me now! Is this a real blog where we can write on a subject or current event topic and receive comments from fellow bloggers? All civilized, of course?
I would like to see people write about their personal concerns, business ideas, social agendas without self absorbtion or self promotion. The world is too big and we need to think before we speak. There are many cultures and opinions to contemplate with thoughtful respect and encouragement. I’m looking for something fun and intellectually stimulating (which is anything anybody has to say from their heart, with much prior thought), especially something that has been on someones mind for a long time but have been afraid to share for fear of rejection. However, expect some thoughtful criticism and ideas that may be counter to your way of thinking but are valuable just the same… thought provoking!
hi Daniel you sound like a person that is bursting with ideas for blogging, I get the impression that this particular blog is focused on if the mybloglog service is to continue, which comes down to money rather than community in the end – there are 1000′s of web apps/widgets all complete with communities, trying to make their money, problem mybloglog have (as I see it) is not enough people are converting to the paid system – me included.
What they really need to do is get customer feedback / do an audit and find out if there is any realistic chance they can tweak this app without losing more money than it’s making, I expect customer feedback of any use to them would cost money, and for big honcho’s like Yahoo they might just decide to shut down a department that isn’t making the sales, it’s black and white to business. Human’s are of course a mix of colors and killing off a community of bloggers might not be good PR – but at the same time Yahoo is currently hosting a lot of widgets on rivals websites – idea – maybe they should stick an advert on the widgets like widget box do – and we pay to get it removed per blog, see ideas like that – I hope they have some clever blog friendly people in a room somewhere coming up with ideas to save this network!
Personally I’ve prefer the option to subscribe to a ‘premium version’ of mybloglog, I subscribed to the premium of hotmail when they were charging for space 5 or so years back – you can charge for things it’s perceived value + how many people can they lose that aren’t willing to upgrade and still bring people in to make a profit, if there is no money in it, there is no business, and these sites aren’t set up for social purposes before profit – it is we human’s that create community – but are hugs don’t pay their bills.
MyBlogLog is still going strong and working fine. There’s no message on MyBlogLog’s homepage to say it’s shutting down.
Is it, indeed, closing down?
Having the above blog post and other news online, I removed the MyBlogLog plug-in from our blog at http://www.azam.info and replaced it with that from another similar company which doesn’t have as many users and isn’t anything as good as MyBlogLog, but should we add it back again?
Thanks.
It is very good to discuss the future, but why put down mybloglog if we don’t have something better in sight? Open up more possibilities instead of a shutdown would even be better right?
Pls keep up the good work!
RE Azam – as you say there are other services, and they don’t get the traffic, I’ve found they also have limitations on the amount of communities you can join, I’m unsure of the agenda with some of them and it puts me off.
This is the main plugin for blogs, but since being told my a newbie – “oh haven’t you heard they are closing it down” I haven’t been adding it to my ‘essentials’ list of recommendations for blog owners, because it might be closed down – and people don’t like spending time promoting dying trends – but there in a ruddy great hole there and no real replacement – If I knew there was at least another 6 months or a year, I could tell people to jump in and make the most of it before it’s gone.
I use MBL to consolidates feeds from my other sites – it does a far better job than Yahoo! Profiles at finding my blogging sites (Y! profiles doesn’t seem to allow me to add a custom RSS feed by URL).
Now if Y! allowed you to add Yahoo Pipes to your profile that would solve a lot of my problems!
I am Alex Afdhal, a professional guide bases in Borneo’s western port city of Pontianak.
I am new pwerson in MBL. It presents a new thing whic is easy to manage. MBL makes me easier to fine suitable connetion with work.
I specialize in organizing and leading guided tours throughout the wilds of Indonesian Borneo Island. I offer visitors first hand access to both pristine jungle wilderness and numerous indigenous villages in Borneo, Indonesia or Kalimantan, Indonesian and other parts of Indonesia. Lacking a large tourist infrastructure, Kalimantan gives visitors the rare opportunity to experience both nature and local communities at their own pace, with their own schedule and on their own budget. I make your dreams come true. For those seeking wildlife, Kalimantan’s raw wilderness offers numerous possibilities. With protected orangutan sanctuaries and large swaths of virgin rainforests teaming with life, Indonesian Borneo is a nature enthusiast’s paradise. For those interested in cultural matters, Kalimantan affords the opportunity to visit traditional communities rarely visited by the outside world. This alone separates Kalimantan from other travel destinations, including even the Malaysian side of the same island! Treks into the heartland allow visitors to experience the culture of local life and customs of its inhabitants in a manner not found anywhere else on earth. With an island wide network of local connections I am able to custom tailor tours for my travel companions. These tours can range from simple overnight visits to a traditional Dayak Longhouse, to multi day treks through virgin rainforest all the way up to full, month long, coast to coast adventures across Borneo. Best regards, Alex Afdhal PS. Feel free to contact at +62 561 7004449/+62 812 5768066 (mobile) or email at: alexafdhal@yahoo.com Office: Jl. Imam Bonjo, Jl. Tanjung Harapan, Gg. H. D. Usman. No. 46 Pontianak, 78124, on Google Earth: Latitude -0.046855°, Longitude 109.350436° Consult also: “Lonely Planet Indonesia the 7th edition 2003, p. 673, the 8th edition 2006, p. 610, and the Lonely Planet Borneo edition 2007, p. 237.” The Rough Guide to Southeast Asia on a budget, 1st edition, Nov., 2008, p.373/4 http://www.linkedin.com/e/vgh/2465682
So, where ARE we? Is My Blog Log here for the long term? Or should we refrain from putting more time into managing our presence here?
(Just for the record: I’ve been an MBL fan almost from its very inception…so, I, for one, wish that it will be around for a LONG time to come…)
“Is it, indeed, closing down?”
Today, it doesn’t seem to be, but somebody does seem to want to kill it. Remember what we saw out of Yahoo, prior to the closing of Yahoo 360? The way basic maintenance was neglected and problem reports were responded to with nothing but handholding form letters? Take a look at Mybloglog, today. Go to the Mybloglog suggestion board, and take a look at the spam
http://suggestions.yahoo.com/?prop=mybloglog
One user in particular, who calls himself “Ajay”, has been flooding the board with spam for months. I’ve reported this. No action, not even a response has followed.
Try creating a community on Mybloglog, as I did last night. Once again, we’re seeing the eternal “refresh pending” – one goes to the “settings” page for the new community, which still doesn’t have a screenshot, and finds that one can’t upload a screenshot of one’s own -
“Screenshot not available (refresh pending)”
It’s almost noon, here in Chicago, and I’m still getting the refresh pending message. I wrote to Support, last night, which shouldn’t have had any difficulty solving this problem, because Tilly told us what was going wrong, last year, when this problem arose
http://getsatisfaction.com/mybloglog/topics/refreshpicturependingforovertwoday_now
“Oops! Sorry about that, totally my bad. Before I left for the weekend I accidentally unplugged the screenshot robot. blush Its back up and running now, you should be all jet set :)”
But this year, the Mybloglog team just couldn’t be bothered. All I got back from “Cid” was one of Yahoo’s form letters
“Hello,
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! MyBlogLog.
I apologize for the trouble you’re having with updating your MyBlogLog community screenshot. I realize how frustrating this must be.
This is a known issue and our Engineering Team is working to resolve it. If you have any additional questions or concerns please let us know as soon as possible.
Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! MyBlogLog.
Regards,
Cid
Yahoo! MyBlogLog Customer Care Mybloglog General Tech T1″
I responded to Cid, providing a link to Tilly’s post, and here we are, on the next day, and no movement has followed. The plan seems to be to let the service fall apart so badly that people give up on using it. That way, instead of having to deal with a huge, public outcry all at once, Yahoo whittles down the user base gradually, so that only an ignorably small group is voicing its discontent at any one time. What we end up seeing is the offering of deliberately bad service as a corporate strategy.
Mybloglog seems to work best as an update notification service. My advice would be to start offering Feedburner as an alternative for those wishing to subscribe to one’s blog. No, one can’t use Feedburner to tie all of one’s content together. Feedburner is definitely not as cool as Mybloglog was before Yahoo started fouling it up, doing to it as it seems determined to do to all of its acquisitions. But Feedburner is a lot likelier to be around two years from now.
Oh – and Mr.Yeh, if you’re reading this … I remember that cute little thing you did with the comment editing a few months ago, and will be cutting and pasting my comment, as is, to my blog. If you try doing the same thing again, don’t think that you’ll be fooling anybody.
What is the current status of MBL?
I have to admit that I have not had alot of traffic on my blog and see that it gets a lot more activity on the social network sites. Maybe that is an area that is be best for it. There is so many social activities to tie into these days that although things are huge, they are spreading out quite a lot.
James A