Kevin over at BloggingTips.com is asking if you think MyBlogLog has gone downhill. He seems to think so. Near the beginning of my blogging experiment, I hopped on the MyBlogLog bandwagon before Yahoo! picked them up. They were a pretty cool service in that, it provided a way to place a face or an avatar with an actual visitor. The service was designed so that, you could build up your social blog network of friends and join each others communities.
Unfortunately, the system has at least one inherit flaw in that, each time a MBL member visits a site with the MBL widget displayed, their avatar displays in the widget. Now, what if a bunch of porn spammers sign into MBL with porn avatars and then visit thousands of sites a day so the avatar shows up in more places? Now you end up with an annoying problem. I must admit however, I performed a small experiment with MBL which mimicked this problem. I visited a bunch of sites in MBL by clicking on a bunch of random avatars to see if it would drive traffic to either my MBL account or my site. Turns out, both areas received a good bump in traffic thanks to the end users curiosity.
Since I’ve redesigned my personal blog, I have not added the MBL widget to my blogs sidebar. I don’t really see a need to do that anymore. Besides, judging from the looks of things, Google Friend Connect appears to be the next best thing.
Do you remember MBL? Are you still using the service and is it providing value to you?
8 thoughts on “The Next MyBlogLog – Google Friend Connect”
I used to love Mybloglog but most of the time their widget is down, I don’t know if Google’s friend connect is any better. Right now I’m using Blog Catalog it has the same feature that Mybloglog offers.
Bill from Austin Divorce Help
Yes it is and it will end up being worthless.
Yeah I started using google connect a week or so. It’s hard to tell how popular it will be at the moment as it’s still pretty new and many bloggers are still testing the waters with it. So far I’m liking it though.
How about that. That really didn’t take long. You figure it should be easy to control the width of a widget these days but I guess not.
Jeff,
Take a look at this article by Steven Hodson on Google Friend Connect, if you haven’t already. It seems that porn problem may already exist.
http://www.winextra.com/index.php/2008/12/09/well-that-didnt-take-long-for-googles-friend-connect-to-be-screwed-with/
My beef with Google Friend Connect is that you can’t control the widget enough for slim sidebars. Otherwise, it could be a nice tool, Steven’s problem notwithstanding.
Patrick D.
Anyone else notice how similar the Google Friend Connect widget looks compared to the MyBlogLog widget?
While on the surface Google Friend Connect and MyBlogLog share similarities Google Friend Connect will offer much more as far as interactions go down the road. Partly because of the fact that anyone can develop a Google Open Social App. It is more a huge distributed Facebook.
Time will tell what will happen but with Google pushing it there is a lot of possibilities.
I have a MBL account but I don’t really look at it anymore. Don’t see the point. There was a time when it brought traffic but not really anymore. I’m trying out Google FriendConnect now. Not sure how that will do but I’m willing to try,
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