I’ve taken out the MyBlogLog widget and also deleted my account there. I don’t have any plans of going back. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why MyBlogLog lost its attraction. The only reason why I haven’t taken it out is because I was just too lazy. Now that I’m going for a little bit cleaner design, I thought I’d rid myself of it.
Here are some quick thoughts on why it lost me.
- It shut my site down at critical moments
- The functionality was always limited
- Privacy issues
- Customer support
One time I was happy to get on a social news site only to open up my blog away from home to see that it crashed and burned. The reason? MyBlogLog. Now that I think of it that should have been when I deleted the widget. A widget killing your blog is uncool on so many levels.
It was supposed to be some kind of a distributed social network but all it had was a very minimal interface with messaging that got abused to death by spammers. I pushed it a bit myself so I’m guilty on this but it just sucked. People were more optimistic a while back but now that the novelty wore off, I can safely put it away.
Frankly I don’t like seeing my mug (avatar) prominently looking back at me on some of the sites I just happen to open because someone linked to it. I’d rather pretend that I never visited the whatever site but no, that’s not possible.
I honestly think the people behind MyBlogLog are really good people. But they’re just spread too thin and clearly in over their head due to the unexpected popularity of their service. I had a couple issues needing attention but our dialogue was going nowhere. Plus, they kept sending me emails about how I automatically joined some community even though I turned off all notifications.
Overall, I didn’t see as many new people on my widget these past couple of months aside from a couple random people every now and then. I think for something like this to work you need some heavy weight promoters in the form of A-list bloggers and a lot of those people opted out a long time ago. You basically had a bunch of B-list and below blogs carrying the torch because uptime might not be as crucial. It didn’t drive any traffic either, high or low quality.
I gave it a fair chance, it was fun at moments and I think it opened my eyes to the possibilities for a really distributed social network based on browser cookies or whatever but at the end of the day it didn’t have much more to offer.
8 Comments
ZOMG! Now you can’t tell if I’ve been to your blog lately or not!
Funny thing about MBL is that I use so many computers every day and only one of them has me logged into my MBL account.
Do I get anything out of MBL? No, not really. I don’t get any increase in traffic. I don’t know of any readers that found me on MBL and then showed up.
I guess MBL is nothing more than a parasite?
Now that you have dumped MBL will you be putting a contact link back up?
I’ve been thinking of dumping it as well.
What I’ve done is left the tracking image online. This means my community page gets updated when people visit.
HMTKSteve,
Uhm, comments? Haha. Yeah, I could care less about it. The readers that matter leave comments so there you have it.
I never took out my contact form, it just got lost in all my design reshuffles. But your wish is my command, I put it in the sidebar.
Just curious though, do you not have my email address??? You’re free to email me any time.
engtech,
I think less is better. I’d rather not add any more moving parts to my blog if it’s going to bring my site down or add too much clutter. It starts looking like a MySpace outpost. I’ve hardly seen any interaction come out of MLB lately. It’s like gravatar with some stat tracking. I just came to a lull and thought, “do I need it?”
I have your email adress on my “main” (the one I almost never use) computer at home!
I do use mybloglog as a backup stats system. I did pay the $25 for a year to get the pro package and I do like the stats it provides. It is very useful to know which articles are leading to offsite clicks
I have had problems with external javascripts. MBL has caused me troubles in the past but the data is too useful for me at this time and I have not had that many slow downs caused by them recently.
What’s with all the Helium ads on your site? Did they buy a block of ads or something?
I think mine works just fine
but I agree with you on their support …
I don’t think they care much about email request..
I don’t think anyone’s buying ads aside from whatever people buy off of AdWords.
Actually, I was getting a decent email response from MLB’s support. It’s just that the process was taking way too long.
I sacked mine off a while ago. It’s irritating.
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