Yahoo will soon kill off MyBlogLog, the service it acquired from the eponymous company behind it back in early 2007.
Here’s the message that was just emailed to all users (myself included): → Read More
There is something about great sales people or deal makers that is entirely social. They are connectors, as Malcolm Gladwell calls them—people who know the interests, skills, and needs of everyone in their social or business circle and connects them together. If you are really good at this, like Sidney Weinberg (a legend who helped build Goldman Sachs), you are a super-connector.
Zentact has the modest goal to help you become a super-connector. It has a long way to go before it can do that. But it is starting with the kernel of something that is intriguing. At its core, Zentact is a browser add-on (for Firefox only right now) that helps you read the Web with the interests of your social network in mind. If you want to try it out, we have 500 invites for the private beta (but once you are in, you can invite as many people as you want by sending them a message through Zentact). → Read More
Twitter is living up to its promise to open up its data stream as much as possible to developers. While I was negotiating with Twitter cofounder Evan Williams to sit down and do a video interview at Foo Camp last weekend, Gnip founder Eric Marcoullier was hitting him up to give Gnip, and therefore everyone, Twitter’s XMPP “firehose.” Williams was obviously in a good mood, because I got my interview and, as I just found out today, Eric got his data feed. What does this mean for the average Twitter user? It means that more third party services will start to work better. Today, other than a handful of services like Summize (which was just acquired by Twitter) and Friendfeed, third party apps must talk to Twitter via their normal APIs. Those APIs require applications to send Twitter a request and then get a response. The two way communication creates a big load on Twitter in the aggregate. With XMPP Twitter just sends out all of their data in a constant stream, whether you ask for it or not. The third party, in this case Gnip, takes the data and parses it for further use. Gnip acts as an intermediary between applications that create social content and those that consume it. They take the Twitter feed, which is a list of usernames, Twitter status URLs and time stamps, and make it available to any third party that requests it. Both Plaxo and MyBlogLog are already using the new feed, and more partners will add it immediately. And every third party that takes data from Gnip doesn’t have to take it from Twitter, easing the overall load on Twitter’s servers. For now Gnip is only sending updates for requested users, not the richer data that some applications like Twhirl need to build a Twitter-like desktop environment. Twitter may give Gnip permission to send additional data, like @replies and direct messages, over time (if that last sentence doesn’t mean anything to you, it means you aren’t a crazy-heavy Twitter user, just disregard it). What this means is that Twitter is taking yet another step towards openness and leaning on outside parties to help them with scaling issues. Battle Over: Twitter Open Up To Gnip. Read more at TechcrunchIT >> CrunchBase Information Gnip Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Following Michael’s post the other day about the future of social networking, we have heard of several more ways the mobile, location-aware nut is being cracked already. One of these is an “experiment” by MyBlogLog started at eTech and SXSW that leverages Bluetooth technology to discover the people around you. The Java-based service, previously named “Meetspace” but now known as MBL Mobile, works on both Bluetooth-enabled laptops and Blackberrys. Once you’ve installed the Java applet and bound your Bluetooth ID to your MyBlogLog ID, you will be able to see other MyBlogLog members within a range of about 30 feet who have also opted into the special service. Their avatars show up on a page that breaks people down into “People Around You” and “People Encountered Most”, the former being those currently detected near you and the latter being those you’ve found yourself near the most. You can click on users to see their activity streams and commonly shared groups. This service obviously works best when you have a group of geeks huddling around the same areas, such as conference halls. As Marshall Kirkpatrick pointed out on RRW, it also has privacy implications that should give MyBlogLog users pause before they sign up. For other companies working on location-aware social networking technologies, check out Imity, Mobiluck, Aka Aki, and Loopt. The first three, like MyBlogLog, use Bluetooth-based detection whereas Loopt depends on GPS. LimeJuice and MeetMoi are two similarly intended startups that only require SMS. In the long run, GPS is probably the best technology for this sort of thing (provides much greater range and detail than Bluetooth), but unfortunately lots of phones don’t have GPS capabilities yet. Also see our posts on an iPhone-only social network and the holy grail for mobile social networks. CrunchBase Information MyBlogLog Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
The blog commenting system Disqus picked up $500,000 in a series A by Union Square Ventures (Fred Wilson), Naval Ravikant, Howard Lindzon, Aydin Senkut. Union Square’s investment isn’t all too surprising considering how Fred Wilson has raved about the service. Including Wilson’s own blog, Disqus is currently used on over 4,000 blogs with nearly 60,000 commenters. The service brings enhancements to blog comments that are not standard features in most blog installations, such as threading, spam filtering, comment/user ratings, and user identities. They’ve also integrated OpenID support through ClickPass. Disqus launched with a host of other commenting services around October of last year. IntenseDebate is a close competitor from a competing incubator, TechStars, as well. SezWho, and CoComment also provide some of the same support. The overall trajectory of the Disqus and other commenting systems is toward building communities around blogs, similar to MyBlogLog (sold to Yahoo). The idea is to serve as an aggregation point for conversations across multiple blogs so avid commenters can more easily track what’s being talked about. They also want incorporate other feeds such as Facebook and Twitter into user’s profiles. While larger blogs might not like the idea of providing content for another destination site, co-founder Daniel Ha says that the service has already taken hold in verticals such as politics and finance. CrunchBase Information Disqus coComment SezWho Intense Debate Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier sold his company to Yahoo in January 2007 for an estimated $10 million. He left Yahoo in July 2007. Eric is now preparing to launch a new startup, Gnip. Details are scarce for now – Marcoullier isn’t saying what the new startup will do other than a hint on the site itelf – “Web 2.0 Infrastructure,” and a message that the service will launch in May. The startup is already funded, he says, with a $1 million round from Foundry Group and SoftTech VC. Foundry Group’s Brad Feld and SoftTech VC’s Jeff Clavier are joining the board of directors of the company. CrunchBase Information Eric Marcoullier Gnip MyBlogLog Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
MyBlogLog, a blogger social network acquired by Yahoo about a year ago, launched v.2 of their service tonight, with a significant new feature. You can see the MyBlogLog widget in the right sidebar of this site – it shows pictures and names of recent visitors. The new feature is an activity stream of recent activities by all users on various social networks – blog posts, new photos, bookmarks on Delicious, Facebook updates, Twitter updates, etc. The image shows the new profile page – mine is here, and I’ve added a summary widget below. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the startup feature du jour. Facebook first popularized the news feed in late 2006. Later others took the idea and opened it up, creating a news feed around activities on a variety of social networks. FriendFeed is the most popular, and recently raised a $5 million round of financing. Plaxo, Soup.io, Iminta, Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand, Fuser, 30Boxes, Mugshot, Readr and Second Brain all have variations. Party planning site MyPunchbowl recently released its version. And now, Facebook is planning to open up their NewsFeed and allow users to add other services as well. Yeah, I know. That’s way too many similar services to test out. If you’re a casual observer and just want to try out one service, go with FriendFeed (my account is here). People are flocking there, and starting to use it as a hub to leave comments and other content. If you’re already a Plaxo user, their Pulse product is just as good. Facebook isn’t open enough yet to really be called a competitor. The new MyBlogLog features are a great addition to the product, but it’s not innovative enough to make a big impact. They do have a large community of loyal bloggers using their service, however (including me), and I’ll certainly keep an eye on the activity streams of the people I follow there. → Read More
Blog tracking and commenting services such as the now Yahoo owned MyBlogLog continue to have fairly widespread usage, but using these services could pose a security risk, at least according to Citibank. Zoli Erdos uses both MyBlogLog and BlogRovr and got a rather interesting message whilst trying to log into Citibank: Could something you type into a secured site on Citibank end up on one of these services? If it’s a browser plugin that sends data back to a central service it could in theory track and record anything…although that presumes that these services would also be being used for evil as well, not just for occasional spamming like some services are. → Read More
When we covered the slate of companies helping people chronicle family stories and milestones, we left out a quiet but excellent Redmond, Washington startup called Sampa. They aren’t new, and we’ve covered them before. The reason we left them out is that we’ve had some difficulty in categorizing them. In many ways Sampa is a blog platform with a focus on privacy features, like Vox. But we’ve also compared them to easy site creation tools like Weebly, Synthasite and Jimdo. But recently they’ve added new features to focus on family story telling and milestones. There is now a Geni-like family tree feature, and trusted visitors can upload photos directly as well. And they’ve also added a MyBlogLog-type feature that shows visitors to the site – both their name and an avatar. Sampa sites have areas that are private by default, so only people you invite in see the site (they see it via an invitation URL, and subsequent visits are authorized via a cookie. The hodge-podge of features results in a really compelling hang-out for families to tell their stories, celebrate weddings and births, and share photos and family tree information. The site is also free, although eventually users will be able to pay to have advertisements removed. It’s a good site, and one of many startups that are doing a lot on very little capital – the company has raised just $310,000. CrunchBase Information Sampa Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Angel investor and startup advisor Jeff Clavier (pictured with Digg founder Kevin Rose) just announced a new $12 million early stage venture fund today at the TechCrunch40 conference. The new fund will be called SoftTech VC II. Clavier, who has a degree in computer science, has been actively investing in startups over the last few years and has had notable successes such as Truveo (acquired by AOL for a rumored $50 million), Userplane (acquired by AOL for a rumored $35 million), MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo for $10 million), Kaboodle (acquired by Hearst for a rumored $30-40 million), Mayas Mom (acquired by BabyCenter for $7 million), Dogster, Kongregate, Edgeio and many others. In other words, he has an eye for winners. His investment philosophy will remain much the same, he says. He’s just now investing money from limited partners as well as his own capital. He says he’ll invest the fund in a total of 30 to 40 seed stage startups with investments ranging from $100k – $500k. SoftTech VC will focus on consumer Internet. Clavier has made four initial investments through the fund: Satisfaction Unlimited, Social Media Network, Grouply (which will launch at the conference today) and Active Athlete. → Read More
FEEDJIT Live traffic Map The Feedjit traffic widget launched a month ago and is now claiming some fairly serious viral growth – 3 million impressions per week from the blogs that have added it. When installed on a blog, the widget shows people who enter and leave the site and, and where they are located. Neither the blog publisher nor visitors need to register for the service – the code just has to be on the site. Feedjit offers two types of widgets. The first resembles MyBlogLog in that it shows recent visitors to the site. I’ve installed it at the end of the post. Tonight the company added customization features to let people set the size and color scheme of the widget via Ajax controls. “Arring Town,” shown below, is my favorite for obvious reasons. The second widget, integrated at the top of the post, shows a map with the location of the last 100 visitors. Hover over any dot to get more information about a person. This is an excellent widget and is much easier to use than MyBlogLog. If Feedjit can keep growing at this rate, though, perhaps an early exit is also in the cards for them. There’s only so much extra space on a site, though, and there are simply too many “must have” widgets. It’s all gotta end sometime. FEEDJIT Live traffic feed → Read More
MyBlogLog, a distributed social network which was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year, will launch a tagging feature later this evening that will allow users to add descriptive tags to the people and blogs (called “communities”) on the service. The new feature serves a number of purposes, founder Eric Marcoullier told me this evening. The main use will be to categorize topics and people to let users find new content they might be interested in. If you read a certain blog, view it’s MyBlogLog page (ours is here) and click on a tag to see other blogs that are tagged with the same word. The company is also asking users to help fight spam by tagging spammy sites with the word “Schmoe,” which they say stands for “Social Media Optimizer” (SchMOe). The team will review those tags and associated sites and take appropriate action. Tags can be added by any user to any other user or blog community. Once a tag is added, others can vote it up or down which increases or decreases its size in the cloud. The owner of a profile can permanently remove any tag. The company is importing tags for blogs from Del.icio.us and Technorati to get initial content; they say they will add other sources as well over time. The new feature is based on a Yahoo internal tool developed by Cameron Marlow at their Berkeley research center, called Tagsona. Yahoo employees use Tagsona to tag co-workers internally (sounds like loads of fun). MyBlogLog continues to expand. Marcoullier says they are tracking 100 million monthly visitors to sites that have the MyBlogLog widget, and have 140,000 registered users. Just recently, he said, more people without blogs (readers only) started registering than users with blogs. The service will be redesigned, and possibly renamed, later this year. → Read More
We’ve re-embedded MyBlogLog onto TechCrunch – we removed it a few months ago due to spam and reliability concerns. After repeated promises by founder Eric Marcoullier and Yahoo (which acquired the company) that the service was stable and spam was under control, we’ve decided to give it another try. I like the widget, which shows recent visitors to the site and builds out a social network based on who’s visiting what blogs. We’re glad to have it back, and look forward to the upcoming redesign. The widget is on the right sidebar and is also embedded below. It’s good to see everyone’s smiling face, and the occasional spam logo, here on the site again. → Read More
MyBlogLog, the ubiquitous blog widget that shows pictures of recent visitors to a site, was one of the “instant” success stories of 2006 – Yahoo acquired the company before most people even had a chance to hear about it. Like many blogs, we had the MyBlogLog widget on TechCrunch for months. We eventually removed it due to performance issues (it slowed down the site on a couple of occasions) and this incredible amount of spam that started to appear. Some of that may be changing, David Dalka says. At a conference in Chicago yesterday, MyBlogLog community manager Robyn Tippins told the audience to expect several upcoming services changes. Users should expect a rebranding and redesign of the service as well as a new widget for blogs with hover-over features. They will also be looking for a way to easily turn off presence so that users can hide the fact that they visited a certain site. A redesign will be good. What will be even better is a commitment to 100% uptime. As a widget company it is not acceptable to slow down or take down partner sites. MyBlogLog’s first priority must be performance. → Read More
Update (Arrington): MyBlogLog has responded, apologized and reinstated Shoemoney. Caterina Fake of Yahoo (MyBlogLog’s parent company) has written her thoughts as well. It’s time to move on – and Shoemoney should accept this apology. Yahoo!’s recent addition MyBlogLog is making news again — and not for another security exploit (that was last weekend) or spammer gaming. Well, it is related to those two topics — Shoemoney, a notable blogger in the affiliate marketing world with a fairly large following of readers that like his insight on all things related to online marketing, has been banned from MyBlogLog. The real funny thing is that the security hole Shoemoney blogged about had been discovered and posted publicly (in French language — translation here) over a month ago by eMich — yet as of this writing, that user hasn’t been banned. Founder Eric Marcoullier responded to this: That is truly amazing and embarrassing that someone sent us details of this hack a month ago. I’ve checked my historical email (I receive all the incoming emails) and cannot find it, so it either got spam filtered or lost during my transition to a new laptop. Neither is really no excuse. As you may have heard, we’re hiring a community manager who will help ensure that this sort of oversight will not happen in the future. There is no policy on MyBlogLog’s website to state when they would ban a member — ironically they stated earlier this week that they plan to create a Terms of Service (TOS), so that users would be accountable for breaking the rules. Shoemoney has posted various exploits in the past, but it wasn’t til this latest one that Yahoo! decided enough was enough. The exploit he posted about was how you could surf the web acting as another user. Thus, you could change some code on your computer and visit a website with the MyBlogLog recent reader widget installed, and the avatar/profile of any MyBlogLog user you want to be, would appear in that widget. Shoemoney posted the IDs of some notables such as MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer, Jason Calacanis, and TechCrunch. By doing this, you could continue surfing your own website using Jason Calacanis, and then after 10 visits to your community (if that default option was still set in the user’s account), Jason Calacanis would be joined to your community — and that would give you some → Read More
Michael Jensen shows that it is quite easy to spam MyBlogLog (recently acquired by Yahoo), and he used TechCrunch as the guinea pig for his experiment. We, like many other blogs, display the MyBlogLog widget (right bottom sidebar), which shows recent visitors, along with their photo, to the site. All he did was create a new account with the advertising he wanted included as the image. He then opened TechCrunch in the Opera browser and set it to autorefresh every minute or so. The result was that the “user” kept coming back to TechCrunch and popping to the top of the widget. Some of the traffic that clicked through to the user page on MyBlogLog made its way back to the destination site. Given how easy this is to do, it’s certainly worth the effort. Jensen quickly expanded his test to include twenty other blogs. I hadn’t noticed this, but MyBlogLog founder Scott Rafer did, and pinged me about it. He says they’ll be blocking this kind of behavior in the near future. There’s lots of other spam on MyBlogLog, although most of it is in the messages users can leave for other users on their pages. Not much harm there beyond a messy MyBlogLog site, and I’m sure they’ll be taking measures to limit that over time, too. By the way, Jensen says he did all this just to point out the flaw in MyBlogLog, not to actually spam sites. Update: I hadn’t seen this before, but in the comments below Richard MacManus points out that Emre Sokullu made a script to to this as well. → Read More
Ok so it’s official and confirmed from Yahoo: They bought MyBlogLog. This was first rumored to be happening in November, but was never confirmed and we updated our post to reflect that. This morning the news broke again but was pulled immediately afterwards. Now it’s popped up again. Since I had no idea if it was going to stick this time, I called Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo’s VP Product Strategy, and he confirmed the acquisition. And Om Malik was actually at dinner with co-founder Scott Rafer when the deal was finalized, so it’s a definite deal. MyBlogLog will be part of the Yahoo Developer Network and report in to Chad Dickerson (who reports to Bradley). The size of the deal is not being confirmed, although rumors put it at $10 – $12 million. The fact that MyBlogLog will be in the Yahoo Developers Network is a good signal. Yahoo’s recent acquisitions have been handled pretty well from a user-care standpoint, and it looks like they’ll be taking a similar approach here. Bradley did say that eventually users will be able to log in with their Yahoo IDs, though. That will expand the potential user base significantly. Congratulations to the MyBlogLog team. This thing took off like a rocket and never looked back, and we are a proud member. → Read More
As 2006 closes in, my favorite web service of the year is MyBlogLog. Despite Yahoo! acquisition rumors a few weeks ago, the company is still privately-held. If I were in the web M&A business, they’d top my list along with music social networking service Last.fm. MyBlogLog has built the next generation social networking service. If Friendster/MySpace/etc are v1.0 of social networking websites, this is v2.0. The service has created a distributed social networking platform — allowing websites and blogs to enable social networking amongst their community of visitors. Today, MyBlogLog has added support for MySpace profile pages. This is a way for them to infiltrate the MySpace market. MySpace pretty much offers what MyBlogLog has, except MyBlogLog has 2 things MySpace lacks: MyBlogLog will show you who recently visited your webpage (only other MyBlogLog users) — this comes in handy for the curious cats that like to know who’s viewing their profile. MyBlogLog is a distributed social networking system that allows you to communicate with not just users of MySpace, but users visiting thousands of other blogs/websites on the web. How it works is that you create an account with MyBlogLog, grab a snippet of code, place that code in your MySpace profile, and then you can see what other MyBlogLog users visit your website. The only qualm I have with the MyBlogLog service is the company name — it pigeon holes their business to blogs. In all reality, they should have partners such as NHL.com, NYTimes, and Slashdot — websites with communities of users that would love to learn more about each other and message each other. In my opinion, every website should have MyBlogLog — it allows your users to interact with one-another and builds community. I’m waiting to hear about the first marriage that happens as a result of MyBlogLog enabling two users to meet each other on a website that both had regularly visited for years, but never had a means of learning about each other (or other visitors of that website). A couple months ago, I exchanged messages through MyBlogLog with CEO Scott Rafer, whom told me they have been looking for an alternative domain — do you have a suggestion Scott and his team? Editor’s Note: This post was written by Steve Poland, a guest contributor. Steve is the founder and web strategy consultant for Vested Ventures, a firm specializing in website consulting, internet → Read More
Update: One of Yahoo’s PR firms, OutkastPR, emailed us to say that this story is innacurate, and that Yahoo has not acquired MyBlogLog. We dug a little deeper with some insiders and it appears that Yahoo and MyBlogLog are in very early acquisistion discussions, and nothing more. Founder Scott Rafer was completely silent when asked about the rumors today – suggesting he didn’t mind getting all the press attention. In the second social media acquisition by Yahoo! story in the last 12 hours, news has emerged that Yahoo! has agreed to acquire MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog is a blog community and analytics tool used here on TechCrunch (see sidebar) and many other blogs around the web. Just recently out of beta, the site gained traction in a hurry. We first profiled MyBlogLog in October. The company is rumored to have gone for about $10 million. Requests for comment haven’t been replied to yet. Last night we also learned that Yahoo! has agreed to acquire online contest site Bix, a company led by Epinions founder Mike Speiser. Katie Fehrenbacher reports that Yahoo! has also confirmed today that they have acquired Swedish mobile company Kenet Works in a deal that closed several months ago. We’ve been told Yahoo! will come out with a monster release at CES in January as well. → Read More
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