Sexy Widget

MyBlogLog Left Its Mark

RWW points us to news that Yahoo will be shutting down MyBlogLog, the innovative analytics / community widget that burst, unfunded, onto the early adopter scene in late 2006.

MyBlogLog was the first service to really bring the concept of distributed, cross domain services to mainstream bloggers.  The list of companies they influenced is long and important - you can see elements of MBL in JS-Kit / Echo, Disqus, Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, The Facebook Fan Box Widget, and many more.

Many of us that followed MyBlogLog closely were disappointed that they chose to take a quick exit, selling out to Yahoo in early 2007. Though, who can blame them? 

Here's Fred Wilson speaking at the Widget Summit in 2008:

"MyBlogLog is the most interesting widget I ever used.  I realized then that widgets were more than just showing content…. but introducing new functionality.  My blog had become a (lightweight) social network. 

"Tried to invest, had a signed agreement, but before we could execute, they sold to Yahoo.  I don’t think they realized the potential of what MyBlogLog could become."

And here is a collection of quotes from SexyWidget about MyBlogLog from over the years:

On the innovation of not just building another social network (2006):

"At a time when it seems that everyone is looking to build a destination social network, MyBlogLog has found an intriguing angle – cobbling together all of the mini communities that exist in the blogosphere through the distributed provision of some basic social networking tools.  There’s a lot of blogs out there that could benefit from some enhanced community.  This is a big, useful idea."

On MBL providing value to both readers and publishers (2006):

"MyBlogLog is already providing clear value to both blog publishers and blog readers.  Publishers benefit from enhanced community on their blog because properly executed, online community can complement content as a way to pull folks back to your site.  Blog readers benefit, because the MyBlogLog service recognizes their presence and is a step towards putting them at a more equal footing with the blog owner."

On the value of swimming against the current (2006):

"When I think of the hundreds of destination site social networks (many of them funded) vying for visitors attention, and a look at the tiny handful of businesses trying to enhance community functionality for the millions of blogs out there, I see a big disconnect.  If I were investing in these sorts of opportunities, I’d be a lot more interested in hearing about MyBlogLog’s plans that some “MySpace of ______” site."

On MyBlogLog's potential (2006):

"My sense is that MyBlogLog is on to something big.  If you play this concept out a bit, and you imagine a scenario where MyBlogLog is capturing traffic and user data from thousands of a high traffic blogs, there are all kinds of revenue models and services that could emerge.  They could facilitate introductions between people and blogs, blogs and blogs, and people and people.   They could capture statistical benchmarks and best practice data for various segments of blogs.  They could develop a blogosphere wide reputation management system.  The possibilities are almost limitless."

On MBL's influence on the industry (2007):

"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." 

On MBL's massive backlink machine, and the missed destination site opportunity (2008)

"I was doing a little research on Yahoo Site Explorer on a widget provider that is claiming some pretty big traction (more on this later).  In the process, I did a reality check of backlinks againstMyBlogLog. MyBlogLog is showing up as having more than 3.5M backlinks.  Gulp.  If these guys would build out a destination site with some landing pages that people actually search for (as opposed to MyBlogLog profile pages), they could turn a fire hose of organic search traffic on."

MyBlogLog lived fast and died young, but it certainly left its mark.

Here is a full list of my posts covering MyBlogLog:

MyBlogLog Widget - A Review (October, 2006)

The Promise of Distributed Social Networks (February, 2007)

On MyBlogLog, Cookies, and Resource Allocation (February, 2008)

MyBlogLog: Build out your Destination Site Already! (March, 2008)

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Five Quick Thoughts (and some questions) on the Google / Yelp Rumors

I'm a long time competitor and admirer of Yelp.  They've done so many things right where others have failed, and have moved the consumer review space forward more than any other company besides Amazon.

Here are my quick thoughts on the rumored Google acquisition of Yelp.

- As an entrepreneur, I'm sorry to see Yelp sell out.  As a competitor to Yelp, I'm thrilled.  If past acquisitions are any indication, it won't be long before the visionaries leave, and Yelp becomes a feature and not the vibrant community with a cult following that it is today.  See Epinions.

- Google could have used a brute force / thuggish approach to bring the acquisition price down like MySpace did with Photobucket a few years back.  MySpace broke PhotoBucket's widgets during negotiations as a show of force - Google certainly could have quietly made Yelp content slide down a bit in the organic search rankings.  I'm happy they didn't go this route.

- This is a decisive signal that Google is indeed looking to be more of a destination, and not just a middleman.  I find this scary.

- GigaOM's theory that this is somehow an admission by Yelp that they have somehow been circumnavigated by lightweight mobile services like Twitter + Foursquare is offbase IMHO.  Yelp has a million downloads of their mobile app.  Most people don't have enough friends online creating content for a friend only approach to be a viable, mainstream competitor to a service like Yelp.

- If this sale does go through, it is certainly an admission by Yelp's leadership that getting to IPO was likely to be difficult.  Gravity was against them.  And by gravity, I mean Google - continuing to own search and 97% of all website referrals, flooding local merchants with their own stickers, dropping huge plastic pins all over cities, and increasingly looking to be a destination.  I'd also heard rumors that Yelp was having a tough time getting profitable - big, direct salesforces aren't cheap.  The economics of this model will work better across the combined local inventory of Google and Yelp.  Again, I truly believe that Google could have destroyed Yelp, could have broken their backs by cutting off their search referral oxygen, and then picked up the pieces at firesale prices.  That they chose not do this reinforces my belief that Big G really does prefer to see itself as a guardian of the web, and not a destroyer.

- Some questions: will Yelp content be integrated into Google's local pages or will the property be left alone?  How will this affect Yelp's already dominant organic search rankings?  How will Yelp's outspoken community react to the new overlords?  Will Google be able to retain Jeremy, Russ, Nish, and the rest of the Yelp team, or will they bounce to new startups in two years?

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Google: From Middleman to Destination

Update: OK, this post is looking a little more timely with the Google / Yelp rumors.  See discussion on TechCrunch, GigaOM, the New York Times, and RWW.

I was remarking to a co-worker yesterday how nice Google's local business pages are looking.

Check out this example page for a restaurant in my neighborhood in San Francisco, Luna Park.  It's pulling in a whole bunch of reviews from various sites, it's now parsing ratings by different criteria, there are tons of images, there are maps and Google street view, and plenty of structured data like hours and payment information. 

It's a very nice effort, that draws heavily from content aggregated around the Web, as well as Google's own properties.

And if you are a content publisher that currently gets traffic from organic Google traffic, it's a damn frightening turn of events. 

The Luna Park page above is a destination page. 

Sure, you can click off to check out the original source of some of the review and image content, but you don't really have to.  Pretty much all the information you could ever need is right on that page.  And if this page were in play in Google's organic search results, it would certainly rank near the top.

And that's the thing, for a brief period a few weeks ago, I was seeing some of these pages in the organic SERPS.

Was this a foreshadowing of the future, or a glitch?

Google's product pages are starting to look like destination pages as well - here's one for an 8GB iPod.

And here's an example person destination page.

I tend to be a bit paranoid when it comes to Google, but it would appear that they are starting to build out destination pages for every thing - business, product, person, etc. - in the world.

The question is not, "What does Google's move towards being a destination mean for Yelp?"  The question is, "What does this mean for the Web?"

Google has become a dominant company by being the most powerful online middleman in history, sitting between the searcher and the destination website.  It appears that they may be starting to wonder what would happen if they became the destination.

I've been talking a lot on this blog about the rise of big, horizontal content sites like Demand Media and Answers.com. 

Perhaps we should be adding Google into this discussion.

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The Golden Age of Scrobbling

Friends, we are entering the Golden Age of Scrobbling.

As far as I know, music service Last.FM invented the term "scrobble" to describe the act of automatically uploading the meta data (Track Title, Band, etc.) of the music you listen to on your computer to Last.FM's servers.  Why would you want to do this?  Probably one of two reasons - 1) As a musical diary which can help you crank out self expression widgets that show the world how awesome your musical taste is; or 2) more practically, to let Last.FM use this information to recommend you music and people that are compatible with you.

A whole little ecosystem has developed around the Last.FM scrobbler.  Music services like BandsInTown let you drop in your Last.FM ID in order to keep you abreast of when your favorite bands are playing nearby, and services like HypeMachine let you push the music you listen to on HypeMachine over to Last.FM.

But Scrobbling doesn't have to be an implicit process running in the background.  And it doesn't have to be music.

One of my favorite nightlife apps is LastCall - an app that helps you track your alcoholic intake and chart your blood alcohol level.  It's a booze scrobbler if you will.

Brad Feld tweeted about a Fat Scrobbler (aka wifi enabled scale) this morning that uploads your weight over time to a server, so you can track your fitness.

Foursquare and Gowalla are location scrobblers.  It doesn't take a genius to predict that other location based services will soon let you enter in your Foursquare or Gowalla IDs to provide location based alerts / recommendations on top of this scrobbled location data.

There are also calorie scrobblers and running scrobblers and web browsing scrobblers.

Obviously, the rise of smartphones is going to help the scrobbling ecosystem greatly.  The biggest weakness of the Last.FM scrobbler was that it only scrobbles music you listen to on your computer, leaving out what you listen to in the car, or on the go.  Better phones, better apps, and more bandwidth will help in this area.

My question is... what else can we scrobble?  And when are we going to have a scrobbling insert for my throat that tracks all the food and drink that goes down there?  I want a display, preferably overlaid on a contact lens, that tells me the point of the day when my calories consumed has surpassed my calories burned.

Mobile + Activity Sensors / Trackers + Scrobbling is going to make for some magical apps.

Will Demand Media's Link Development Strategy Backfire?

On October 19, Wired published an article about Demand Media called "The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model."

The article was well written, compelling, and detailed a vision for the production and search optimization of content on a scale that we hadn't seen before.  For me, the killer paragraph was this:

"Reese is a tall Texan who serves as Demand’s chief innovation officer and who created the idea-spawning algorithm that lies at the heart of Demand’s process. To determine what articles to assign, his formula analyzes three chunks of information. First, to find out what terms users are searching for, it parses bulk data purchased from search engines, ISPs, and Internet marketing firms (as well as Demand’s own traffic logs). Then the algorithm crunches keyword rates to calculate how much advertisers will pay to appear on pages that include those terms. (A portion of Demand’s revenue comes from Google, which allows businesses to bid on phrases that they would like to advertise against.) Third, the formula checks to see how many Web pages already include those terms. It doesn’t make sense to commission an article that will be buried on the fifth page of Google results. Finally, the algorithm, like a drunken prophet, starts spitting out phrase after phrase: “butterfly cake,” “shin splints,” “Harley-Davidson belt buckles.”

This isn't a PR puff piece.  Any time a company starts talking about their secret sauce, about the elements that make up their titling algorithm, you slow down and take notice.

And then you ask the question "why?"

Why would Demand Media document their playbook?  Why would they risk pissing off Google, the distribution arm of Demand Media?  Why would they risk giving potential competitors like AOL any more information than what was publicly available?

Here's what I think happened.

In order to make the Demand Media model work, you need a constant supply of high quality inbound links.  A steady supply of quality inbound links drive Google crawlers deep into Demand Media properties' pages, and reassure Google that these pages are worth indexing and ranking.

I think Demand Media made a conscious decision to trade a glimpse of its strategy for a barrage of inbound links.  Any good linkdev person will tell you that PR can be a powerful source of inbound links, especially if you have a good story.

Up until this weekend, the plan was working beautifully.  A quick search on Google Insights shows a spike in interest in the company right around the time of the Wired article.

However, the strategy may have worked TOO well.  The big tech blogs such as TechCrunch and RWW have not been content to post about how innovative the Demand Media model is and leave it at that.  Instead they have started worrying about the rise of "Fast Food Content" and "Content Farms."  VC Paul Kedrosky picked up the message and posted about how broken the tail of search was.

Search expert Danny Sullivan tweeted on the subject last night as well, saying (ominously):

"(I would) be more worried about content farms in google http://bit.ly/6dyezM if (I) didn't know public attention like getting now is a huge weed killer."

I personally think that all the hand wringing about the generation of cheap content explicitly created for tail search queries is overblown.  If Google is doing its job, this content will only rank of there is nothing better out there.

But if I were Demand Media, I would start getting a bit nervous about this second wave of press.  Their model won't work without Google's help, and the last thing Demand Media needs is Google proactively moving to bury "fast food content."

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