MyBlogLog to Close Down in January

MyBlogLog is an interesting – and very popular – service, which boomed across the Internet a couple of years ago. Yahoo! bought it back in 2007 for a whopping ten million dollars. MyBlogLog is a service that shows blog writers and readers the faces and profile information of other MyBlogLog users that visit their sites. It grew like crazy after the acquisition by the Yahoo! team, and then… well… it fizzled flat.

In a move that isn’t really surprising anyone, Yahoo! is reportedly shutting the service down in just a few weeks. Yahoo! is not confirming this, stating that they are “looking at options” for MyBlogLog, and that “closing it down is only one option”.

Bloggers are going to be ticked. The general consensus seems to be that Yahoo! let this potentially powerful service languish, and is wasting what could have been an amazing tool for us all. The data amassed from this piece of Heaven could have proven very valuable to people like you and me – had Yahoo! chosen to develop and cultivate it at all.

MyBlogLog doesn’t just show you who visited you. It also offers access to activity streams from social networks that users had associated with their MyBlogLog accounts. For example, there was a bookmarklet built that would show the recent bookmarks on Delicious, pictures from Flickr, and items posted to LinkedIn accounts of your latest blog visitors. How insanely useful could that have been?!

It’s possible MyBlogLog may have been ahead of its time. Services like Twitter and Facebook are just now becoming a major source for connectivity and sharing. So, why is it that Yahoo! isn’t starting to work on further developing and promoting this service… instead of just closing the doors? It makes no sense to me at all.

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