Yahoo! Will Kill MyBlogLog Next Month

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Five years to the month after it was founded, cross-blog social networking widget MyBlogLog will be closed down by Yahoo! in January, we’re hearing from sources close to the project. MyBlogLog is a service that shows blog writers and readers the faces and profile information of other MyBlogLog users that visit their sites.

MyBlogLog was a wildly innovative service that grew fast after launching and was acquired in January 2007 by Yahoo! for $10 million. It made a deal with users: Give us your personal information and we’ll show you the faces of people who read your blog. That was a compelling offer and the resulting data amassed could have proven invaluable, had Yahoo! chosen to cultivate it and a developer ecosystem around it. That potential was so great, in fact, that sunset for MyBlogLog is downright tragic. It’s also likely to anger bloggers all around the web.

In addition to showing the faces of recent blog visitors, MyBlogLog also offered programatic access to activity streams from social networks that users associated with their MyBlogLog accounts. For example, Yahoo’s Kent Brewster, now at Netflix, built a bookmarklet that would display the recent bookmarks on Delicious, photos on Flickr and job titles from LinkedIn of the latest MyBlogLog users to visit any given blog.

Yahoo! has let the service atrophy for years and will now put it to rest. To think that this service offered publishers and developers access to personal, demographic, taste and activity data of a website’s readers – and yet that offering has in the end gone no where – that’s downright crazy.

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick