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February 29, 2008

Yahoo’s MyBlogLog Adds An Activity Stream Feature

Michael Arrington

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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.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 2:38 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Ystreams

    February 29th, 2008 at 3:17 am

    Yahoo! continues to impress the world, albeit bit by bit. But, still good stuff! :-)

  2. Duncan Riley

    February 29th, 2008 at 3:19 am

    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.

  3. Ze'ev

    February 29th, 2008 at 3:19 am

    even with all the content aggregation services out there it still doesn’t feel like anyone has THE killer service.

  4. UltimuM

    February 29th, 2008 at 3:48 am

    http://www. i-guide .ro
    http://www. i-guide .ro
    http://www. i-guide .ro
    http://www. i-guide .ro

  5. free market research company

    February 29th, 2008 at 4:06 am

    yahoo is still follower — may time to some up something new — what about web operating system.

  6. RecruiterGuy

    February 29th, 2008 at 4:59 am

    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!

  7. Ikaro

    February 29th, 2008 at 6:09 am

    Yes, it’s a nice new. The user activity log is something really cool

  8. Prerna

    February 29th, 2008 at 6:19 am

    Enjoy the wholesome entertainment only on http://moviemazic.com

  9. Chris Ragobeer

    February 29th, 2008 at 6:22 am

    MyBlogLog needs to hire a User Interface Designer, faster than I eat spaghetti and meatballs.

  10. Ravi Shanker

    February 29th, 2008 at 6:26 am

    They have all the stuff but they gotta integrate it with its other services.google’s Blogger does it.

  11. Product Launch Formula 2.0

    February 29th, 2008 at 6:32 am

    I stopped using mybloglog since yahoo took over. Now I stick with blogcatalog

  12. MyBlogFans

    February 29th, 2008 at 6:36 am

    using neither MyBlogLog nor Blogcatalog… 8-)

  13. Eric Marcoullier

    February 29th, 2008 at 6:46 am

    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.

  14. Todd Sampson

    February 29th, 2008 at 7:02 am

    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

  15. wow, techcrunch is getting so stupid

    February 29th, 2008 at 7:29 am

    “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..

  16. Matt

    February 29th, 2008 at 8:46 am

    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…)

  17. Jeremy

    February 29th, 2008 at 9:04 am

    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.

  18. Adam Moss

    February 29th, 2008 at 9:59 am

    It’s a nice idea but hardly revolutionary. What happened to the days when Yahoo pushed boundaries with web 2.0 apps?

  19. Tom Kephart

    February 29th, 2008 at 10:04 am

    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.

  20. Leandro Ardissone

    February 29th, 2008 at 10:32 am

    I still think that profilactic.com is the best to get your profile of sites sorted.

  21. Keren Dagan

    February 29th, 2008 at 11:19 am

    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

  22. bob cobb

    February 29th, 2008 at 11:51 am

    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

  23. Roxy

    February 29th, 2008 at 12:46 pm

    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.

  24. Steve C

    February 29th, 2008 at 2:03 pm

    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

  25. Ian Kennedy

    February 29th, 2008 at 3:57 pm

    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

  26. setbrand

    February 29th, 2008 at 7:29 pm

    Good, same way facebook need too cosmetic change with similar feature.

  27. Antony Berkman

    February 29th, 2008 at 7:46 pm

    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.

  28. efsent

    February 29th, 2008 at 11:21 pm

    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.

  29. wayland

    March 10th, 2008 at 5:03 am

    There is a similar website in private beta that doing the same thing, but in chinese.

  30. Matt

    March 10th, 2008 at 1:36 pm

    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.

  31. Matt

    March 10th, 2008 at 1:38 pm

    efsent - i agree! The original idea had lots of potential - i really don’t think that they’re taking advantage of their investment.

  32. A Week In The Life of A Redhead

    March 21st, 2008 at 10:08 pm

    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

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