MyBlogLog, a blogger social network acquired by Yahoo about a year ago, launched v.2 of their service tonight, with a significant new feature. You can see the MyBlogLog widget in the right sidebar of this site – it shows pictures and names of recent visitors.
The new feature is an activity stream of recent activities by all users on various social networks – blog posts, new photos, bookmarks on Delicious, Facebook updates, Twitter updates, etc. The image shows the new profile page – mine is here, and I’ve added a summary widget below.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the startup feature du jour. Facebook first popularized the news feed in late 2006. Later others took the idea and opened it up, creating a news feed around activities on a variety of social networks. FriendFeed is the most popular, and recently raised a $5 million round of financing. Plaxo, Soup.io, Iminta, Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand, Fuser, 30Boxes, Mugshot, Readr and Second Brain all have variations. Party planning site MyPunchbowl recently released its version. And now, Facebook is planning to open up their NewsFeed and allow users to add other services as well.
Yeah, I know. That’s way too many similar services to test out. If you’re a casual observer and just want to try out one service, go with FriendFeed (my account is here). People are flocking there, and starting to use it as a hub to leave comments and other content. If you’re already a Plaxo user, their Pulse product is just as good. Facebook isn’t open enough yet to really be called a competitor.
The new MyBlogLog features are a great addition to the product, but it’s not innovative enough to make a big impact. They do have a large community of loyal bloggers using their service, however (including me), and I’ll certainly keep an eye on the activity streams of the people I follow there.
Yahoo! continues to impress the world, albeit bit by bit. But, still good stuff!
They’d want to get their act together on speed, the last post on your MyBlogLog page listed as being from you (I presume they’re pulling an RSS feed) is 14 hours old as I write this comment, and at least three posts old.
even with all the content aggregation services out there it still doesn’t feel like anyone has THE killer service.
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yahoo is still follower — may time to some up something new — what about web operating system.
Another great feature – while some bits and pieces seem to be lacking here and there, this is a continual step in the right direction by Y!
Yes, it’s a nice new. The user activity log is something really cool
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MyBlogLog needs to hire a User Interface Designer, faster than I eat spaghetti and meatballs.
They have all the stuff but they gotta integrate it with its other services.google’s Blogger does it.
I stopped using mybloglog since yahoo took over. Now I stick with blogcatalog
using neither MyBlogLog nor Blogcatalog…
Sadly, this feature has been ready to launch since June of 07, when it would have been a pioneer instead of a follower. Regardless, I’m psyched that the rest of the team had the temerity to stick it out at Yahoo in the belief that they would get to start launching killer features.
It appears that Microsoft’s takeover attempt has galvanized Yahoo and there is now a “Damn the torpedoes!” mentality that wasn’t present six months ago.
Yes, this may be a bit of a “seen it” feature, but the MyBlogLog team was the best I’ve ever worked with and I’ve seen first-hand some of the crazy shit they’re rolling out over the next couple of weeks. Bad. Ass.
Thanks for the post Mike. It is much appreciated.
Eric: Thanks man! We really miss you on the team. You too are the best at what you do — if only there was a term for all of it.
Duncan Riley: We noticed that too. For some reason FeedBurner was about 12 hours behind on TechCrunch for yesterday. Since that is the feed we use, it was a bit out of date. That said, the New With Me service is meant to give a taste of what people have been up to — not an aggregator for the real-time web.
Cheers,
Todd
Co-founder, MyBlogLog
“Yahoo’s MyBlogLog Adds An Activity Stream Feature”
hahahaha, whats next.. youtube changes font color from navy blue to blue?
This is getting so stupid..
so Michael, prediction time… beat Calacanis to his “you heard it here first” and speculate on who will be buying friend-feed this year? (and possibly ruining the serivce…. if its Google, its screwed as they will shut it down for a year as they “improve” it then they’ll release it as an aspect of an existing service, causing many users to abandon… OR it might be Yahoo.. who has a great track record of acquiring companies and letting them flourish as they did before, only with Yahoo backing… ) will be interesting to see… (and fun to watch if Yahoo and Google try to fight over it, considering the founders… hehehe…)
Yep, we’re a “me too” on the activity feed feature (launched ours in November…) I think Mark Zuckerberg basically encouraged a lot of copycats when he said that their traffic had increased by 50% from adding that feature to facebook.
Will it increase mybloglog’s traffic by 50%? Probably not, imho. It’s a decent product, but they aren’t moving fast enough to make it better…and there are a lot of “mybloglog copycats” now running around that weren’t there 1 year ago.
It’s a nice idea but hardly revolutionary. What happened to the days when Yahoo pushed boundaries with web 2.0 apps?
Maybe the last-minute rush to get this new version out explains why I can’t get anyone but the bots in the customer service department to reply to me for the last 10 days.
I do like the facelift, though. It surprised me this morning, had to look twice to make sure I’d clicked on the right bookmark.
I still think that profilactic.com is the best to get your profile of sites sorted.
It is a nice addition and I like MyBlogLog too but I hope to see an option to get rid of /hide some feed items from a stream. I see a lot of items from My Neighborhood that I don’t care about and those hides the one I do.
Keren
I kind of like it, but it is WAY too active. It tells me too much about people I don’t know and don’t care about
Competitor BlogCatalog launched a VERY similar service a few weeks ago which I have been using daily. MyBlogLog’s doesn’t seem to have any filtering options that I have seen so far. I prefer being able to filter who I follow and which services I see in the feed the way blogcatalog does it.
It will be interesting to see how mybloglog’s product evolves.
Be interesting to see a comparison made between mybloglog’s lifestream feed and blogcatalog. blogcatalog has invested a bunch of time on the interface making it easy to follow what’s going on with friends. mybloglogs lifefeed interface seems stuck in the 80s
Looks like Feedburner has caught up and as a consequence, so have the updates on MyBlogLog.
@Tom Kephart, feel free to contact me at ikennedy at yahoo-inc.com and we’ll get things sorted out for you.
Ian
Product Manager, MyBlogLog
Good, same way facebook need too cosmetic change with similar feature.
Ian, looks really cool. Perhaps you should add blogcatalog to your member’s lifestreams
After all blogcatalog is a BIG part of many of their lives.
the only good thing mybloglog has ever done was show an icon of who visited your page. the rest of the service is a cruddy stew of other things better done nearly everywhere else.
There is a similar website in private beta that doing the same thing, but in chinese.
They really need to sort out that interface and colour scheme. Yahoo need to integrate MBL into the normal Yahoo way of doing things – it still feels too much like a separate company.
efsent – i agree! The original idea had lots of potential – i really don’t think that they’re taking advantage of their investment.
Since the Yahooized Mybloglog launched it’s new interface, I went from getting new members every day to NADA – NONE – ZIP new mwmbers in weeks, so I don’t bother with the service anymore. I have moved on to others that serve a better purpose. Also, many of the old bloggers with Mybloglog hate the resdesign. I decided to stop by and see if you were writing about it, and here you are…
Love your blog … as always.
Sincerely,
Catherine, the redheaded blogger
MyBlogLog violates AdSense TOS. MBL publicly releases your AdSense Click through Rate (violation of section 7, TOS). See this article for proof.
do it some thing to kindness in this leave is very good .