Late last week MyBlogLog updated their sign in process to require you to use your Yahoo ID when logging into the system. What surprised me most about the change was how it seemingly went unnoticed or unreported in the SEO community. I’m curious if you still use MyBlogLog and how relevant you think it is as a social site?
If you haven’t logged in for awhile the next time you do you’ll be greeted by a message asking you to login to Yahoo and choose which of your Yahoo profiles you want to use. The process is painless assuming you have a Yahoo ID or want one and assuming you have a profile you want to use with MyBlogLog. My only Yahoo profile was one I didn’t want to connect to my usual social media profiles. There must have been a lot of other people trying to access the system at the same time so the servers were crawling. It wasn’t pleasant and I wasted a couple of hours setting things up.
Yahoo will tell you how wonderful this is for you since you have one less password to remember, but for me it’s now taking longer to log in than it used to.
I don’t want to give you the impression the change was all bad. In the end it’s just a different way to login. An email prior to the change would have been nice and telling me something is being done for my sake when I know it’s being done for you bugs me, but again not really a big deal. The change is supposed to speed up some of the widgets and allow you to use a new Yahoo nickname across sites, which are both good.
Yahoo most likely made the change to make it easier for them to track users across across proprties. Reason number 5 they give for the change says as much
Share optional info such as your age, gender, and location across Yahoo
Privacy concerns or not this kind of user tracking is getting pretty standard and maintaining some level of privacy amounts to logging out and clearing cookies. The change does have me wondering if del.icio.us might also see a change even thought it’s resisted the integration for a couple of years.
Given Yahoo’s inability to gain marketshare on the search side strengthening their hold on the social space makes sense.
What I’d like to see, especially now that MyBlogLog is sharing the same login as Flickr, MyYahoo, and the new Yahoo Mash, among other social properties is more integration between the sites. If you update your profile on one site how about asking if you’d like to have it update across any or all of the others. Don’t force the interaction among their various properties, but offer it as an option.
I’m still somewhat surprised at the lack of mention in the SEO community to the new switch to using Yahoo IDs. Admittedly this isn’t earth shattering news, but sometimes it seems as if a Google employee moves his car across the parking lot a few hundred blogs already have a picture of the plate number and a detailed history of the employee. If Kevin Rose sneezes the entire blogoshpere hands him a tissue. When Yahoo first bought MyBlogLog it was the darling of the community and now little more than a peep.
I can’t say I spend a lot of time on the site. I do log in before my daily blog reading. I see it as an exercise in branding your blog. It’s another way to let someone know you’re interacting with their blog even if you haven’t left a comment or better yet if you do.
So is anyone still using MyBlogLog? I know a few of you do since I see your images when I log in. But has MBL fallen so far down the list of social sites that the password change doesn’t merit a mention? Not big news I realize, but news I would think.
Are you still using MyBlogLog? Did you ever use it? Did you notice the password change?
