When the Five Hundred sedan didn’t sell well, Ford renamed it after a much older model, the Taurus. Ford didn’t change the car in any substantial way, but name recognition is everything, right? Now Yahoo may be attempting to apply that theory to MyBlogLog; a name change is in the works, and other, more substantial, alterations should also take place.
A complete redesign is among the things scheduled for the site, according to David Dalka. He spoke to Robyn Tippins, MyBlogLog’s community manager, at SOBCon, and also reported that “[a] new ‘Widget 2.0’ is coming with some hover features.” A new name, a new look, and new goodies – now we’re getting somewhere.
Issues of appropriateness and privacy will also be addressed. “Yahoo! is hard at work to remove the offensive photos so that MyBlogLog would be palatable to more conservative business blogs,” wrote Dalka. Then, if you should happen to wander off course, “Some sort of method to turn off your presence for some types of sites will be added.”
This overhaul could be exactly what MyBlogLog needs. On the other hand, the changes (while certainly more significant than Ford’s unabashed – and smart – marketing ploy) may not go deep enough, and The Social Web’s Steve O’Hear thinks Yahoo may have mixed up its priorities.
“First they need to fix performance issues, and keep out spam,” wrote O’Hear. He later stated that, “For MyBlogLog – or whatever it ends up being called – to really succeed, it needs to not only win back those early adopters who’ve abandoned the service, but also to reach a much broader user base, way beyond the tech blogging echo chamber.”
That issue may be a challenge for Yahoo, MyBlogLog, and Robyn Tippins; perhaps they should run some sort of promotion involving free oil changes.
