Its a sad day. I just deleted my MyBlogLog account. I used to be a heavy promoter of MBL, but I just couldn’t get into the whole new focus of the social network/stats package. When MBL launched it was a great little service that would tell you in simple terms what exactly was happening on your site. Anyone could understand it and it wasn’t overkill like Google Analytics was (before their makeover) but then they decided to go too far in my opinion. Although the blogosphere has been raving about the whole social network aspect to “help people discover new blogs” but I just didn’t like it. It was overkill and I was really surprised when Yahoo bought it but I’m not surprised to see it tank like it has been. I know they just released an updated version that is supposed to have better reliability and security especially for their widget.
Their widget was a tool that would show on your site the image and name of registered MBL users who visited your site. Stalking-Web2.0 style. It received mix reviews all over the web and for good measure. It kind of creeped people out and a lot of times it was abused by spammers. Dirty spammers figured out how to cheat the system and put their link and image on the top of any widget they wanted. It was kind of creepy to log onto TechCrunch and see LovelyLiolita as the top visitor on one of the web’s most popular site.
Supposedly, MBL has taken care of all these problems by letting you manage everything a little more closely but honestly, who wants to spend that much time managing something like that. Our time is too valuable and there are free programs out there that will do a better job with a lot less maintence. Google Analytics, Mint and Performancing Metrics are three that I use that I’ll try to review soon.
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I am new to MBL but the main reason i picked was because of the widgets. I guess it does what I need but for others it does not.