If you think you’ve heard this before, you have. Yahoo has acquired MyBlogLog.com (the service that allows those photos of “recent readers” to appear over in the right-hand column of the rexblog) for a reported $10 million. The (unfortunate?) name, MyBlogLog.com, doesn’t convey how significant a concept it is — but, chances are, the creators didn’t realize when they started out that they were creating such a significant concept. It works out that way more times that not.
In a nutshell, MyBlogLog adds “Facebook-like” social-networking features to any weblog — or webpage, for that matter. It allows a blog (or any website) to create a community and a means to establish contacts. As with Facebook, you can post both personal and public messages on someones account. A nuanced, yet significant, feature (if you’ve ever tried to figure this out, you’ll understand how significant), an individual using MyBlogLog.com can associate himself (herself) with several different weblogs or websites they create — in other words, you can establish an identity both as a person and as a website (or multiple websites) with which you are associated. It’s a big deal — and the fact that it’s a big deal doesn’t sink in until you’ve been using it about a month.
Now, why Yahoo!? If you look at the content over on the right hand side of my weblog, you’ll notice that my “photoblog” is a feed from Flickr, my “sidebar blog” is a feed from del.icio.us and my “recent readers” display is from MyBlogLog.com. All three are now owned by Yahoo! — I’m not sure exactly what that all means, but I do know that when it comes to social media widget generators, they’ve got some pretty amazing tools. I’m glad it’s them, not me, that have to figure out how to pull all that together and conquer the world. What do I mean by that? For example, I now have Flickr contacts, del.icio.us contacts and MyBlogLog.com contacts — shouldn’t I be able to blend all of them? Also, I have this weblog running on an open-source platform hosted on a server I own, however, Yahoo! now is hosting a big chunk of the content that appears on it, and I pay them (at least for my Pro account at Flickr) to do it — [Note to a narrow niche of readers of this blog: I know, I know, I should be able to have an open identity, attention thing that I control and that follows me everywhere I want it to, but it will only come from watching Yahoo! and Google do this across multiple services they own that people will understand they should be able to do this across every site and service they use.]
Congratulations to all, including Yahoo!
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