MyBlogLog is all over the tech blogs today due to their announcement of a new lifestreaming feature that aggregates your activity from various social networking sites on MyBlogLog.com.
I like the feature – as I’ve said a few times on this blog when covering Plaxo Pulse (here and here), a universal news feed that aggregates your friends’ activity from all over the web adds a lot of value. I would imagine that these services will continue to propagate and thrive as long as FB chooses not to offer it themselves.
But what I find really interesting here is MyBlogLog’s choice of resource allocation. There are a lot of things they could be working on now. They could be working on a Facebook App. They could be working on an OpenSocial / MySpace App. They could be adding to their stable of blog widgets. They could be focusing on their API.
As a backdrop, this is a company that has always prioritized its presence on the open web over its destination site community. Indeed, the fact that MyBlogLog.com is light on traffic didn’t get in the way of a nice exit for the company.
So why this sudden interest in their destination site? It could be due to a couple of factors. Maybe they stumbled across my post on Hub & Spoke and saw the light :) Maybe there’s corporate Yahoo! pressure to deliver ad revenue, which as we know, is easier to do on a destination site than with a sidebar widget.
Or maybe it’s a cookie problem. I don’t know about anybody else, but somewhere along the way, I lost my MyBlogLog cookie and just haven’t gone back to MyBlogLog.com to activate it again. How do you make people go login again? You give them a reason to go to the destination site.
The promise of cross domain features with a single login is one of the most compelling aspects of the new generation of cross platform, cross domain web services. MyBlogLog is a “presence” feature – one that could be considered a spinoff of the popular “who’s online” feature on social networks. It works anywhere, and if you’re logged in to this feature on one domain with a MyBlogLog widget, you’re logged into all of them.
The problem for service like MyBlogLog without a very active destination site is that once that cookie is lost, it’s difficult to get their users to log back in again. If you provide them a reason to login to the destination site, you’re more likely to retain that cookie, thus making your distributed footprint reach its full potential.
Yet another example of how a sturdy home base community can enhance a distributed footprint.
Yes, you are dead on.
They have always taken great pride, and rightly so, in being a company that has mastered the distributed web.
I am not sure it is a matter of losing the hub as much as they lost their mojo after selling out to Yahoo. Twitter doesnt seem to have much of a hub yet this hasn't stopped their momentum.
MyBlogLog had a ton of momentum and the sale stymied their initiative. Their community gave them a fairly large grace period as they had built up a ton of well deserved goodwill.
It appears that their grace period has almost run its course. Once lost it is difficult to regain. See Yahoo for the perfect example of this.
Posted by: Tony Berkman | February 29, 2008 at 02:39 PM
I would agree with you, except Yahoo has historically been pretty good about not messing with the startups that they buy. Delicous, Upcoming, and Flickr have all seemed to be left pretty much to their own devices. Then again, Bradley Horowitz used to be one of the real champions of keeping bought startups in startup mode - maybe that's changing now that he's gone. Yahoo is certainly a company under tremendous pressure to do a better job monetizing - perhaps this is the driver.
Posted by: lawrence | February 29, 2008 at 02:50 PM
wow, loved reading this.
keep up the good work :)
Posted by: Hack how to | March 29, 2009 at 03:34 AM
I agree wiyh Lawrance "I would agree with you, except Yahoo has historically been pretty good about not messing with the startups that they buy. Delicous, Upcoming, and Flickr have all seemed to be left pretty much to their own devices. Then again, Bradley Horowitz used to be one of the real champions of keeping bought startups in startup mode - maybe that's changing now that he's gone. Yahoo is certainly a company under tremendous pressure to do a better job monetizing - perhaps this is the driver."
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