Appatic

MyBlogLog.com is now dead. As Yahoo once again kills a innovative property they bought and then neglected.  MBL was a Blog Social Network that  debuted back in 2005 and that could be added to any existing blog, which allowed any Blogger to also have a extra social profile centered around the Blogs he worked or owned. It was the first one to do something later on Google and Facebook copied with their Blog Badges and to what Facebook also connected to a Facebook Page via the Like Buttons.

MyBlogLog was one of those Yahoo Acquisitions where I thought that Yahoo had actually  understood the huge potential behind a startup and they were buying it so it could reach that potential for them. One of those where I got it completely wrong.  Yahoo only put resources for MyBlogLog during a year and then let it rot. So from the time when they released their MBL 2.0 version in february of 2008, they were already on Yahoo’s Death Row just like it also happened with Delicious among many other Yahoo acquisitions and projects.  But unlike with Delicious, Yahoo was not interested in selling MBL and for some reason they just wanted it to close it. Back in December 2009 was when the first rumors about MBL being closed down started and because of a snapback of user interest, Yahoo decided to let the property lie there in zombie mode until now.  The way I see it, is that they then calculated that another year would be the time needed for any interest left from users and bloggers to wane. Unfortunately they were right. Because of Google Friend Connect being in every Blogger Blog and also because of the Facebook Page Badges, most of what was interesting about the original MyBlogLog has a perceived replacement of sorts. But even then, the point was not that. The point is about just how bad Yahoo is able to fuck up in executing the potential out of a acquired web property that formed part of a stellar lineup of ideas from the web 2.0 craze.  Ideas that could had gone way further but just didn’t because of how they were handled and instead got extinguished. So long MyBlogLog, so long.

If you want to know why exactly I felt so strong about what could had been done with MBL, then please read the post I wrote back in December 2009 called:

MyBlogLog: A Perfect Example Of Missed Opportunities

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