Another of Yahoo!'s web services bites the dust. I'm a user of the service, as I am for Delicious, another of Yahoo!'s services that they identified as wanting to off-load in an announcement they made last month (January). It's a pity because I've found both of these products/services incredibly useful. Apart from their utility the other - often unrecognised - consequence of the demise of these services is the loss of several years personal investment in building social equity. So, it will soon be back to obscurity for me!
Users of MyBlogLog, a start-up that Yahoo acquired in 2007 for about $10 million, received an e-mail early today announcing the service's demise.
The announcement is not exactly a surprise. MyBlogLog was one of the Yahoo services listed on a leaked presentation screenshot from December as a property that would likely be sold or shut down as the troubled Yahoo cuts costs.
Ahead of its time in a sense, MyBlogLog built widgets that site owners could install to show which MyBlogLog members read their blogs--the same philosophy that now powers, for example, widgets displaying Facebook members who have "liked" a site. The original leaker of the screenshot was Eric Marcoullier, the founder of MyBlogLog, who no longer works at Yahoo.The service will be formally discontinued on May 24, and people who have paid for a "premium" subscription to MyBlogLog past that date will receive refunds.
Other Yahoo products that face potential shutdown or sale include Yahoo Buzz, a one-time competitor to Digg, and Delicious, a bookmarking site that still has some very loyal users. Other products, like Fire Eagle and Upcoming.org, were marked for mergers or consolidation; so far, few of the expected shutdowns and mergers have actually happened.
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