MyBlogLog, the ubiquitous blog widget that shows pictures of recent visitors to a site, was one of the “instant” success stories of 2006 - Yahoo acquired the company before most people even had a chance to hear about it.
Like many blogs, we had the MyBlogLog widget on TechCrunch for months. We eventually removed it due to performance issues (it slowed down the site on a couple of occasions) and this incredible amount of spam that started to appear.
Some of that may be changing, David Dalka says. At a conference in Chicago yesterday, MyBlogLog community manager Robyn Tippins told the audience to expect several upcoming services changes.
Users should expect a rebranding and redesign of the service as well as a new widget for blogs with hover-over features. They will also be looking for a way to easily turn off presence so that users can hide the fact that they visited a certain site.
A redesign will be good. What will be even better is a commitment to 100% uptime. As a widget company it is not acceptable to slow down or take down partner sites. MyBlogLog’s first priority must be performance.
This redesign is long overdue - I CSS’d the crap out of my widget as soon as I installed it. Although, I really really hope they don’t follow the current widget trends and change over to Flash.
As you rightly pointed out, Mike, the widget is a bit of a sloth. Fingers crossed they can squeeze in a x 100 performance boost too.
It’s a shame the guy with avatar with the massive set of knockers will probably never, ever, use the presence cloaking feature - I’d like him to know that my parents look at my site every now and then. I was caught with those knockers about 10 pixels away from my face.
Wonder how many blogs are excited about Yahoo owning all the MyBlogLog data being generated by them and possibly Microsoft owning it in the future?
I used to have Mybloglog account. I’ve deleted it. Here’s why… The company did not follow privacy policy guideline.
They started to steal NDA stuff off the web.
It can happen to you or anyone else.
They need to allow you to host your community on your own servers. I thought they promised that this was coming - and I was hoping this would be one of the upgrades.
Do you know if this is coming? They used to use TC as an example.
The same reason I deleted mybloglog account!
The Jobster Blog Buddy takes mybloglog several steps further.
http://www.jobster.com/at/jcard/intro
With the Blog Buddy, you can see recent visitors to your site. In addition, you can also see who is hiring and the positions they are hiring for. Hover over a visitor’s picture and the Blog Buddy expands via flash to show the person’s tags and jobs. Click through to add the person to your contacts.
Also, absolutely no spam.
On the “commitment to uptime” point, MyBlogLog has been up and running and rock-solid in a Yahoo! data center since late March and the site and service are substantially faster and Yahoo-stable. Performance and scaling were the first orders of business post-acquisition.
This is what Eric was talking about when he said in an April blog post, “Will the wonders of shiny new boxes never cease?” (he was writing about the return of the auto-join for communities, a feature that had been “on hiatus” until MyBlogLog got some of the Yahoo! server firepower): http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/....._of_t.html
Stealing NDA stuff? Can you provide more info?
Mike — As Chad mentioned, we’ve been on a fleet of Yahoo boxes for almost two months now. If you look around the blogosphere you will see a number of posts that mention the improved performance and nary a one talking about sluggish overall performance. We’re still working on loading the images faster — one of the challenges of working with S3 is that they don’t allow “keepalive” so every image loaded is a separate connection to AWS. But that’s “in widget” and shouldn’t impact your page load in the slightest.
Also, the ability to hide yourself from a site has been in the widget since October. Just mouse over your picture and click the red “X”.
We are very excited about all the opportunities to add great new features to the service, but as we’ve said time and again, our placement on someone’s blog is a privilege. We’ll always prioritize stability and speed over expanding the feature set.
@Eric @Chad
A “great new feature” would be the elimination of your daily limit of 15 communities that you place on joining new communities in MyBlogLog and stop advertising for 2 wicked-good developers. The message limits are fine however to me, and I have no problem with that.
yea mybloglog needs to have more customization options…
I agree with you that their top priority should be on performance.
Glad to know that Yahoo! is going to upgrade MyBlogLog. I might reconsider putting the MBL widget back on my blogs.
And I’m agree with HART. You MBL guys have to do something else to control spam. Limiting a member to join only 15 communities in a day is a bit too much control you are placing on members like me who visit 100s of new blogs every day.
I may be minority but that’s not the right way to control spam. You may also consider adding a few customization features that allow members to filter links in comments. As far as the message limits are concerned, I’m fine with it.
- Avi
Aninash, I think there is a difference between being a part of a community, and having visited a site just once.
Who knows, you may find that the autojoin after 10 visits to a site circumvents the limitations…
Now that is some good news …
May be now I will start using MyBlogLog.
Brazilians have http://www.blogblogs.com.br with some widgets too.
Cheers
Good to see this story, Michael. I met Robyn for the first time in person at SOBCon last weekend and was impressed with how excited she is about MyBlogLog’s future. I think it’s a widget-maker to watch not only because Yahoo! owns it now, but because it’s got a strong community built up already. There’s emotion attached to it whether one likes MBL or not, and that probably will help MBL in the long run.
I’ve never had a problem with the MBL widget, It’s not surrounded by inordinate amounts of shiny plastic and rounded corners like some other widgets.
I like MBL for the fact that I don’t need to put any effort into my community unless I really want to, it just runs itself - which is a good thing when I already have too many other things to do for the amount of time available.
I hope new design more speed and speed.