You're on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon, Digg, Flickr, and a thousand other social networking sites. But keeping up with your friends and contacts on each site could be a full time job. Or you could sign up for a single service that lets you view your contacts' activity on a single page. FriendFeed is a service that launched last week, which does exactly that. But the service didn't get hog the spotlight very long, as Yahoo!'s MyBlogLog has launched a feature this week that lets members track their friends' activity streams.
Existing MyBlogLog members should notice the change right away. Your new profile page will feature all of your recent blogging activity. And if you've already added other social networking service to your profile, you should see updates for those as well. When you click on the "my neighborhood" button you'll see an activity stream with updates from your MyBlogLog members who use those services.
We have to admit we haven't given much thought to blogging community site MyBlogLog over the last year or so. The service launched as a way for bloggers to get in touch with one another and find new sites they might be interested in. But Technorati and Google Blog Search are both much more useful for finding blogs covering topics you care about.
But that doesn't mean there's no value in MyBlogLog. The service offers a couple of web site tools including a free and subscription analytics package and a "recent visitors widget," that shows the profiles of other MyBlogLog members who have visited your page. And this week MyBlogLog rolled out an updated and much improved version of that widget.
Not only does the new widget have a slick Web 2.0 look and feel, but when you hover your mouse over the name or image of a recent visitor, you see link to their MyBlogLog profile and links to their web sites. This adds value for anyone who publishes the widget on their site, and also creates an incentive for bloggers and web publishers to sign up for a MyBlogLog account since there's a better chance that someone might see their profile on a random page and click through to their site.
To get the widget, just login to your MyBlogLog account and click the "Get Widgets" button to get the HTML embed code.
If you wanted a widget that could connect all of your friends regardless of creed their specific network such as MySpace, Facebook, their own site, etc., there is a new open source social networking site that lets you do that. Explode lets you connect all your friends from disparate social networks together. You do this by using a search term or interest tag to find others who share your interests. Explode will find them across all the platforms and you can add them as your friend to be included on your very own widget.
Explode was created by Curverider, a UK open-source social network provider. Similar in concept to Mybloglog, which was recently acquired by Yahoo, Explode's open source roots may potentially give it a leg up on Mybloglog's recent security glitches. Hmmmmm. Who do you want to be today?
MyBlogLog seems to be in its uncomfortable and awkward teen-acne phase where nothing it does comes off quite as planned. The blogging community site has managed to gain amazing traction so far however, they'll need to do some serious security mea culpa cleansing ritual to wash off the stink they've acquired in recent weeks.
Update : The security hole which allowed this trick to work has been closed, and in fact was closed at the time of our first posting. Thanks to Eric from MyBlogLog for straightening us out!
These days, most social services integrate with the Flickr API, so I thought nothing of it when I saw that I could set that up. However, according to a post on Mashable!, it looks like this is a shiny new feature (we love those here).
Further investigation finds a post on the MyBlogLog blog where the developers announce this new way of adding pictures to your profile.
The Mashable post gets into additional thoughts for Yahoo! property integration - Yahoo! IDs is a given, and del.icio.us makes sense also. I'd also like to add Yahoo! 360 - for those of us that use it, it'd be nice to incorporate the MyBlogLog tracking into the 'official' blogging service from 'Big Daddy'.
If you already use MyBlogLog, we'd love to see you in our Community.
A couple months back we reported that Yahoo! had purchased social networking site for bloggers MyBlogLog. What we didn't report was that shortly thereafter Yahoo! PR denied Techcrunch's report, saying the to companies were in discussions, and nothing more. Oi. Well now, almost two months later, it's really, truly happened: The talks are concluded, the deal is final, and MyBlogLog is now really and truly property of Yahoo!--Om Malik got it from the horse's mouth. The acquisition price was reportedly $10 million (the same figure rumored back in November), and the MyBlogLog team will be joining Yahoo! in Berkeley and San Francisco. Much like with the Flickr acquisition, new MyBlogLog users will be able to log on with their Yahoo! ID, and the companies are promising some level integration between MyBlogLog, Flickr, and Yahoo! answers. GigaOM has more details and background, as does Mashable.
Hey, big spender. Today Yahoo! shelled out for not one, but two companies: MyBlogLog, a social networking site for bloggers and their readers, and Bix, a social contest service. Neither purchase price has been announced, though rumors say $10 million for MyBlogLog. I'm a big fan of MyBlogLog, which allows people to build communities around their blogs and, through a tracking code snippet, also collects salient statistics like which links your visitors clicked on the most and where they came from. Bix I wasn't familiar with until today, but the concept is interesting: It allows anybody to create an online contest that their friends (or anyone) can enter for, say, cutest cat or best lip-sync video.
TechCrunch has the scoop on the MyBlogLog acquisition, which I think makes perfect sense next to its social services Flickr and del.icio.us, and of course its search business. The New York Times has the details on Bix, which it says is is "trying to capitalize on two trends in popular culture: the fascination with TV shows like 'American Idol' and the explosion in user-generated online content, especially video." I'm not sure how well Bix fits in with Yahoo!'s current lineup, but if executed correctly it could be huge.
Hey, big spender. Today Yahoo! shelled out for not one, but two companies: 
