Tuesday, March 01, 2011

MyBlogLog closing - Yahoo's death wish?

I received the following e-mail from Yahoo!

We will officially discontinue Yahoo! MyBlogLog effective May 24, 2011. Your agreement with Yahoo!, to the extent that it applies to the Yahoo! MyBlogLog, will terminate on May 24, 2011.


And if you go to the site there is now a notice that says

MyBlogLog will no longer be in service from 24 May 2011. We recommend Yahoo! Pulse as a service for you to see all your social updates from your favorite networks in one place.

With Yahoo! Pulse, you can create your own identity on Yahoo! and you can easily connect and engage with the people, content, and applications that matter to you, wherever you are on Yahoo!


But I don't want yet another service to see all my social updates from my favourite netowks in one place. I've already got Google Buzz and Plaxo Pulse (Yahoo! couldn't even think of an original name) and anyway, who's to say that in six months or a year Yahoo! won't announce that they are closing Pulse, as they've already closed Webrings, Geocities, Yahoo360, and now MyBlogLog?

And will their Pulse show who has visited my blog so I can visit theirs?

They are closing a useful service and replacing it with a useless one that duplicates what a dozen others are doing. I don't need yet another "one place". One "one place" is enough, two is a duplication, and Yahoo Pulse is the redundant department of redundancy department.

Yahoo! clearly has a death wish.

The other social blogrolling service, BlogCatalog, became quite unusable, with greatly reduced functionality, about 5-6 months ago, so that's the end of that. I wonder if it's a sign that blogging itself is in decline?

Yahoo! has a long history of taking over useful online services and then abandoning them. First it was Webring, then Geocities, and now MyBlogLog. That means that the last useful service they maintain is their listserver, Yahoogroups. It's also something they took over from someone else, an outfit called e-Groups. If they abandon that, there'll be nothing left that will make it worth remaining a member of Yahoo!

3 comments:

Sergey said...

The best service Yahoo maintains is Flickr.

Anyway, MyBlogLog-like viral widgets are, in my opinion, redundant, and had to go away one day. They were promoted as a means to show visitors and "connect" the blogger with the visitors. Analytics allows for watching all who's visiting, not only those who play this particular social widget game. Comments allow to connect people and to show their attention and presence (if they really want to disclose it), and a single comment tells much more about a visitor, than a random userpic. And most of social blogging platforms have this feature built-in and better integrated.

Usability-wise, these widgets increase page load time, and sometimes even affect scrolling smoothness. Internet is going to be better without them.

Yossi Barazani said...

Yahoo to Shut Down MyBlogLog - Miss it? http://Publishedin.com Might Be Of Help http://blog.publishedin.com/post/3519850188/yahoo-to-shut-down-mybloglog-miss-it-publishedin

Steve Hayes said...

Сергей

I don't use Flickr, and I think the best service Yahoo offers is YahooGroups - I don't know of any other public list servers.

But in the two months that MyBlogLog has been down, I find I have visited fewer blogs and so missed quite a lot. One can, of course, put blogs you like to visit in the blogroll, but that doesn't help you to discover new ones. So I really miss MyBlogLog.