Bloggers unite! Yahoo! joins forces with MyBlogLog

Posted January 8th, 2007 at 8:53 pm by Chad Dickerson, Yahoo! Developer Network

 36 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

There once was a time when bloggers basically lived in silos of independent existence. Hunched over your keyboard, you checked your ego feeds every day, looked for inbound links, followed the various meme-tracking sites, and read who you thought was interesting. But aside from comments on a site, there wasn’t a real way to create a community from the faceless masses of blog readers. If your blog was a microphone, sometimes you wondered: “Is this thing on?”

All that has changed with MyBlogLog, the Orlando-based company that has quickly built a thriving social network of blog publishers and readers. You’ve probably heard the rumors and I’m here to confirm that Yahoo! has agreed to acquire the assets of MyBlogLog, and aside from loving the product and the team, we think this move complements Yahoo’s social media and community initiatives perfectly.

I know many of you are already avid fans of MyBlogLog (just do a search for “love mybloglog”), but for those of you who are new to the site, it gives readers the ability to create communities around the blogs they visit and connect with their favorite publishers more directly. Once you create a profile on MyBlogLog, you can associate your blogs to your profile, and other MyBlogLog users can join communities around your blogs. A cool widget lets you see the faces of your recent readers in real-time. To see MyBlogLog in action, just look at the “recent readers” widget on our sidebar.

At Yahoo!, we have a global community of over a half a billion users, and we’re always looking for ways to better connect the people in that community to each other and to the communities (large and small) that they care about. MyBlogLog helps us do this like never before. If blogging was originally about building a community and having a conversation with people in that community, then MyBlogLog provides the missing link that makes those connections more real.

When I first saw MyBlogLog, I experienced one of those “Aha! This is really cool!” moments. When I put the widget code on my own blog and saw the first visitor stop by, I felt the same rush of connectedness that I felt when I got my first comment on Flickr. It makes sense then that MyBlogLog follows in a line of key acquisitions that includes Flickr and other leading social media sites like del.icio.us and Upcoming. Taken together, these vibrant web communities continue to provide Yahoo! with a deeper understanding of communities and user activity that reach beyond the Yahoo! network.

MyBlogLog is providing connections for me already — in the unexpected ways that make social environments on the Web so uniquely compelling. I was recently reading TechCrunch (a publisher with a vibrant MyBlogLog community) when I saw the face of a friend in their “recent readers” widget (small world!). I added him as a friend on my MyBlogLog member page and I got a nice “Hey, how have you been?” email from him in minutes. You might come across a friend (or make a new one) on the “recent readers” rolls on sites like ReadWriteWeb, Fred Wilson’s A VC, or any of the thousands of blogs out there that have already plugged into the MyBlogLog community.

The community-building features of MyBlogLog demonstrate just one set of capabilities of the platform. Stats junkies like me will appreciate that MyBlogLog also offers analytics that give deeper insight about what pages are being visited. You can then choose to expose some of those analytics to your readers, like the Top 5 most-clicked links. Add in the community elements and what more do you need?

For you die hard fans wondering what will change to your beloved MyBlogLog — not to worry. We aren’t planning on making any immediate changes to the MyBlogLog website, distribution or branding. We want to encourage the continued growth of the community and foster the innovation that has already made MyBlogLog an indispensable part of your life. In short, we want to make what you already love even better.

Since the company was founded in 2005, MyBlogLog has accomplished an incredible amount with its lean-and-mean team of five, led by CEO Scott Rafer and founders Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson. We’re proud to welcome them to the Yahoo! team, and more specifically, to the Yahoo! Developer Network group. We’re looking forward to building even better social media opportunities. I’ll see you around the Web.

Chad Dickerson
Sr. Director, Yahoo! Developer Network

Post a Comment Bookmark This Digg This

36 Comments Add your own

SEARCH ENGINES WEB | January 8th, 2007 at 9:24 pm

_________________________________________

EXCELLENT CHOICE!!!!!!

BlogLog is superb technology – they are innovative – please add more detail stats – there is so much potential with this technolgy

mybloglog.com/buzz/members/google/

qureyoon | January 8th, 2007 at 9:59 pm

this is a very great news !

mybloglog, is a great one, and with yahoo! it’ll be even more powerfull i guess :)

great jobs to Eric and guyz at MBL!

congratz :)

Startups.in/India | January 9th, 2007 at 12:15 am

Great way for Yahoo to start this New Year. MBL is the best thing to happen in social networking space and Y! did the best thing by taking them into its fold.

Nag.B /at/
http://Startups.in

Alex | January 9th, 2007 at 12:22 am

Congrats, this is a really interesting and bold move, and an inspired one too. I’ve become a mybloglog user a week or so ago, and I think it’s really cool indeed. Wish you all good luck!

AL | January 9th, 2007 at 12:24 am

Great move YAHOO!

Ian Robertson | January 9th, 2007 at 12:36 am

I look forward to seeing what will come of this partnership. :)

hector | January 9th, 2007 at 12:37 am

MyBlogLog is cool, i cant wait to see how it fits into Yahoo!, thank you Rafer.
Chad i loved this post about MyBlogLog and social media opportunities. Your Flickr photo sets are cool, more so because of comments and descriptions which i dont find in 80% of flickr photo sets. There has to be a automated, quick n easy way of getting users to give some information with photos posted by them.

On a different note regarding websearch-

Cell search:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/cell2.htm
Dna- If the query entered by the user is the DNA, then you have got to study the Cells and Enzymes to give good search results.

Ladder search:
If my query is ‘Cat’ and if i am climbing a ladder. What will my results be at the first rung and then at the 30th rung?

Prime Search:
If my main search is ‘flower’ for the search session. Anytime during my session, while i search with other keywords like bat, ship, smog etc., All those results/pages are searched for flower related content and gathered as a Prime search result.

Search documents:
If the query is ‘green car’ then the search results can be given in the format of a document.
*About/introduction results-coz no site should be given too much exposure, ‘about web results’ can be from blogs and smaller sites.
*Content/description results- search results with/or ‘media gallery’, educational, research, history, news, business etc.,
*Shopping results- shopping results, companies etc.,
*Q&A results- search results from Y! answers.
This could be a result set of 20 sites each per page.

Search pheromones- Every user and every site is emitting pheromones, study it.

Gravity- Any architecture is built ground up and then is demolished to the ground. Imagine Search results as architecture.
*For the same query their are many result sets.
*However good the result set is, their is a another set that can be created by the user during a session. (Best of images for query ‘Paris Hilton’, Set of best 5 sites for a query during a search session) These sets must be destroyed at the end of every session.

Content travel- If your visiting Paris for the first time and you have only 5 days of time to see the city. What will you do? Now if you had a month, what will you do? More important, tell me what kind of people would fit these types? Anyway I am thinking about Y! search and Y! directory.

P.S.
I am on a deserted island with this old computer with which i cant do much! I cant brainstorm with you all but wish Y! would be quick with decisions and results.
I see wiki at Y! Answers, why?

Paul Stamatiou | January 9th, 2007 at 12:41 am

Congrats on the successful acquisition. With Y! resources, they’ll be able to up their offerings like no other. Hopefully we’ll see a MyBlogLog API sprout in the next few months.

Jacques Froissant (Altaïde : le recrutement 2.0) | January 9th, 2007 at 2:29 am

Great job to Scott and the team !

Li Evans | January 9th, 2007 at 4:15 am

Hey Chad!

This is great news. I know I can speak for at least a few of the readers at Search Marketing Gurus when I say “we love MBL”!

Now, does this mean we’ll see Yahoo’s blog search back anytime soon??

~Li

alessandro | January 9th, 2007 at 5:38 am

Great acquisition!
MyBlogLog is a great idea. Looking forward to see the integration with Yahoo!’s products.
Best

Ale

unfathomed_psyche | January 9th, 2007 at 7:46 am

This is a Great news !!! the first time i joined mybloglog i was thinking if web giants have notice this amazing site. I must say that i am grateful for such a move

hector | January 9th, 2007 at 7:53 am

Yahoo! is nice and i guess it has a great workplace but 23 or 44 are numbers which equal’s to things it needs to catch up on in business.

Y!
-Its just business and through it you can learn et al ;-)
-Create a brand where users love it, employees respect it and business want it.
-Everything at yahoo at anytime should focus on Brand+profit+users

Top public companies and workplace: http://www.sfgate.com/business/

Benedict Herold | January 9th, 2007 at 7:58 am

Great going…

But I think MyBlogLog needs to improve a lot. After the acquisition news I’m getting the following error in MyBlogLog

“Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can’t connect to MySQL server on ‘db4.mybloglog.com’ (4) in /home/myblogl/public_html/buzz/includes/conn_udb_slave1.php on line 2″

This brings me the question of Scalability of MyBlogLog…

havi hoffman | January 9th, 2007 at 8:40 am

congratulations — I heart mybloglog. It’s the famous for 15 people meme, recently quoted by bradley h. and elsewhere. it’s great to be a Recent Reader in the illustrious company above. thanks!

Dimitar Vesselinov | January 9th, 2007 at 9:48 am

Congratulations to all involved! MyBlogLog rocks! Yahoo! gets social communities!

Susan Kitchens | January 9th, 2007 at 11:35 am

I don’t know how to feel about this. Are you going to kill MyBlogLog like you killed Blo.gs?

As soon as I start getting to use a service, no, make that rely on a service, seems that Yahoo buys it and then kills its functionality. At least, that’s what happnened with Blo.gs and I still miss it.

The only comment I’ve gotten is from Jim Winstead, who sold it to Yahoo, who said on December 13 that it looks as tho it’s officially dead

http://trainedmonkey.com/2006/12/13/bye_bye,_blo_gs

Steve Morsa | January 9th, 2007 at 1:53 pm

Another nice and prescient acquisition, Scott and team.

MyBlogLog will no doubt prove to be an excellent addition to the Yahoo family of products and services.

If you haven’t already done so, you may also want to take a look at a new form of patent-pending (#11/250,908) advertising called paid match, with which you could enable your many advertisers to quickly and easily self-select and bid on the actual traits and characteristics (keytraits) of their most desired customers.

Its no fewer than 8 specific and distinct advantages over paid search include an up to 85% or more reduction in manual/ human-generated click fraud (since fraudsters can’t click on ads they can’t see or find).

Chad Dickerson | January 9th, 2007 at 2:31 pm

Thanks, everyone, for the comments!

@Benedict — regarding the scalability of MyBlogLog, we are going to be able to offer them a LOT of help, as you can imagine.

@Susan — no, we are not killing MyBlogLog. Our only focus is to make it better and that’s the focus of the team relocating to the Bay Area to do it. They will have a lot of help, too. We’re beyond committed — we are doing backflips and the MyBlogLog team is doing backflips with us.

I think the fairer assessment of Yahoo’s recent track record is that we have been demonstrably successful in bringing teams in and giving them an environment where they can continue to innovate and grow. See
Flickr interestingness and clusters, Upcoming (lots of updates on that page, hard to choose one), del.icio.us growth, etc.

See all of you on MyBlogLog!

Mike Lee | January 9th, 2007 at 4:47 pm

Coincidentally, I just started using MyBlogLog recently, after the curiosity of seeing it on TechCrunch took over.

It’s a great tool, especially for small bloggers who are looking for extra ways to get more traffic and learn more about their current readers.

And it’s such a simple idea that, gosh darn it, I wish I had thought of it first!

Matkowskydotcom | January 9th, 2007 at 9:55 pm

I love MyBlogLog and think this was a great move by Yahoo! Congrats and good luck !!

Benedict Herold | January 10th, 2007 at 2:26 pm

Chad,
I would love to see that happening soon at MyBlogLog. Also it would great if you get a better UI all together.!!!

Leafar | January 10th, 2007 at 4:38 pm

I’ve been asking the question around, with no clear answer. I missed Horowitz on disruptive thoughts blog…. So i’ve decided to unleash the question here.

I get the “connect point” but

Are You really puzzling the virtual Identity ?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ulikleafar/261399491/

Beloy | January 11th, 2007 at 7:29 am

Great acquisition!
But Yahoo should continue search for other original web ideas at early stages. Don’t treat this message as my self-promotion only, but I’ve just launched 100% original BILLION Dollar Homepage http://Mini-News.com , – first website in the world made mostly of IFRAME ads!

Yahoo may be shocked to learn that the FIRST 3Kb of Live IFRAME Ad space of Mini-News.com is now on eBay for only $100:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110076764101

http://Mini-News.com

travelnotes | February 14th, 2007 at 1:58 pm

Does this mean we can look forward to face-link spam?

Sholbarkkk | March 1st, 2007 at 6:31 am

Sorry, for offtop, but can you help me?
Where I can find the good translator from English to Italian?
plz… its very impotent for me… (I can’t find the good program in Google.).

easencibe | November 19th, 2007 at 4:51 pm

sran
http://nukloas.cn http://fuyred.cn http://serder.cn http://kilovotra.cn http://jopers.cn
http://dertuxt.cn http://fligol.cn http://gkilom.cn http://derased.cn http://polijas.cn
http://tyukloij.cn http://dergot.cn http://qurepot.cn http://rusder.cn http://flayser.cn
http://klojuvs.cn http://floks.cn http://lopol.cn http://derfaws.cn
Bue!

naisioxerloro | November 28th, 2007 at 6:29 am

Hi.
Good design, who make it?

vieveasitly | March 17th, 2008 at 11:33 am

Why don´t just act nice in forums and on boards?

For me it seem´s like a lot of users are spreading to much garbage everytime they post something. Why are everybody complaining and using so many bad words? If we all try to keep a good tone it will be much nicer for everyone on this board.

I don´t think we have to agree on every subject – but we have to show some respect for another opinions :)

With the hope of respect for everyone …

_____________________________________________
Michelle ;)

Don´t ask what I can do for your website but ask where you can link to mine pressemeddelelse website :)

dizi film izle | August 25th, 2008 at 3:53 pm

Great way for Yahoo to start this New Year. MBL is the best thing to happen in social networking space and Y! did the best thing by taking them into its fold.

japh | September 3rd, 2008 at 10:13 pm

it’s really a great to mke fun!!

gece kahvesi | October 17th, 2008 at 1:49 pm

Does this mean we can look forward to face-link spam?

gorovoyy | January 12th, 2009 at 4:56 am

Hack again?!

Max | June 19th, 2009 at 6:47 am

I totally agree with you

aziz | July 15th, 2009 at 1:49 am

Great job to Scott and the team !

fallen earth chips | November 13th, 2009 at 1:20 am

Great job,i would to join.