According to reports from ReadWriteWeb Yahoo is to close MyBlogLog in January after 5 years.
An innovative social networking tool in its time MyBlogLog allowed users create blogging communities with the blogs they write for and own. Members of MyBlogLog were then able to subscribe to these communities and share bookmarks with other members.
On top of this bloggers could install a widget onto their blog which displayed an image of the faces of people who have visited your blog. These images could then be clicked on which took users to the particular member’s community. This allowed bloggers to have some basic knowledge of who visits their blog and also allowed for content to be shared easily across the web.
In January 2007 Yahoo acquired MyBlogLog which would appear to ultimately be a cause of its demise. Although Yahoo expanded the service by allowing users to see analytics data for the tool through a paid account, it appears that MyBlogLog never quite received the push under Yahoo’s direction that would have kept it competitive and useful.
As MyBlogLog co-founder Eric Marcoullier states “The only way it survives and flourishes is if you have an executive champion who promotes it internally. Shortly after we were acquired we were transferred away from our champion and under someone who didn’t feel the same way about MyBlogLog. In those circumstances, things simply slow down”.
What was once seen as a very innovative and useful tool will soon be resigned to the past and this further illustrates to us not just how far social networking sites and tools have come but also how quickly social netowkring has eveloved.