Posts Tagged ‘yahoo’
Yahoo! MyBlogLog has included a couple of updates since the last time I took a close look at the service.
For one, sorting through “followers” and considering reciprocal “friend adding” is easier because you can filter through the list of friends in a pretty speedy fashion (especially if you have a hundred or more pending followers).
A number of weeks ago, MyBlogLog community manager Miss Tilly mentioned the introducing of a Connector widget.
It looks like (more…)
In the aftermath of an aborted takeover of Yahoo!, Microsoft continues to remain the 800 lb gorilla in the tech industry. The question is where does it go from here?
There’s still talk about Microsoft working with Yahoo! on a collaboration for its search services, but really to leapfrog search engine leader Google, requires a paradigm shift. One possible avenue? The social media game.
Witness the fact that Google hasn’t done much with Blogspot/blogger in the last couple of years.
Services like Google’s Blog Search seemed like a half-hearted implementation.
That’s not to say that Microsoft and Yahoo! are exactly leading the field either.
The Web 2.0 space is still littered with their dying or dead blog services and communities.
A search at Microsoft’s Social Computing Group shows a number of interesting projects, but none really earth shattering to shift the field.
A couple of years ago, Microsoft spun off its own social network Wallop, to fanfare from Mashable and TechCrunch.
So what happened?
For sure, “cloud computing” still seems a distant reality, hobbled by a lack of compelling applications (in contrast, the Japanese with NTT Docomo’s I-Mode service do just about everything with their 3G phones which fold origami-like into small objects of art. Elsewhere in the world, cell phone users rejoice when they get restaurant recommendations or proximity locaters on their phones…).
It could be a good couple of years till (more…)
Looks like Twitter is fast becoming a victim of its own success.
Over the past weekend, the microblogging platform seems to have had a major bout of traffic/resource overload and indigestion and went offline for 48 hours or more.
When she came back, she came back sans direct messaging and pagination (I believe it refers to a backlog beyond your first page of tweets).
In addition to conserve resources, third party apps like Twhirl, can’t seem to do API calls more than once every 5 minutes.
This should take a number of steps to increase scalability and stability, although it will take quite a bit away from the “real time” nature of the hybrid IM/blogging type service.
Beyond being a juicy piece of M&A bait for one of the Google-Yahoo-Microsoft tirumvirate, I’m not sure if Twitter has a viable business model, beyond grabbing marketshare and mindshare for the microblogging space.
If you’ve thoughts on the issue, post your comments below:
Yahoo! MyBlogLog had been the hottest blog/social marketing widget in my opinion in 2006 and early 2007. Somewhere in between the balance of power shifted to Facebook, which continues to be dominant for heavyweight networking.
Lately I’ve been gravitating towards using twitter, although the lightweight 140-character cellphone text messaging aspect of it, doesn’t feel very substantial, and conversations seems to ebb and disappear in the deluge of public and private messages being fired off every couple of seconds.
For a while, it seemed like MyBlogLog had been in a holding pattern, and I’d been hoping for some integration either with the Yahoo! shopping properties or its Mash social network.
I may be wrong, but it doesn’t seem like social media/social traffic is a major focus for Yahoo! now, and that’s where it might be missing the boat.
The New Face of Yahoo! MyBlogLog: Tilly “Two Thumbs” McClainÂ
Still, it was encouraging to see that Tilly McClain has been named Yahoo! MyBlogLog community manager earlier this week (it’d previously been under the stewardship of Robyn Tippins and Ian Kennedy previously), and perhaps we’ll see some interesting developments in the coming months.
Maybe MBL might even have a podcast or a vlog?
I’m sitting here with my fingers crossed…
Robyn Tippins who was formerly Yahoo! MyBlogLog community manager and now Yahoo! program manager for developer experience, happens to own two successful blogs, SleepyBlogger and GamingAndTech.
I’m not sure how long I’ve known Robyn, but I know it’s probably about 2.5 to 3 years.
I first got to know her through my blogging efforts and later she invited me to join the MyBlogLog Advisory Group.
I don’t think a whole lot of people are aware that Robyn racked up about $200,000 in consulting fees in the year before joining Yahoo! and relocated from Virginia to California to take up the position.
During the Friday Podcast, I found out how Robyn got started (generating $30,000 a month from a single physical product), how she branched into consulting, including taking on projects for some of the biggest companies out there, and how someone aspiring to enter the business/web consulting field can get started.
As always, there’re lots of gems in this one.
Check it out:
Just thinking aloud…
I was looking at MyBlogLog product manager Ian Kennedy’s post on the recently launched MyBlogLog API.
[also contains video and links to the tech specs of the API].
One feature of the API is that it is “the only API that I know of that allows you to look-up a person’s identifier across social networks”
Does that mean a spam marketer using the MBL API can scrape all your social network IDs and populate your twitter streams, MyBlogLog message feed, and spam comment on your Flickr photos and blogs?
If the process can be automated, or the captchas can be overcome fairly easily (I’ve heard of a number of programmers who’ve been able to optimize OCR algorithmns on even massively distorted captchas…)
So if the spam barrage hits you on your web 2.0 accounts,
That would be pretty terrible, unless there’s a verification process involved in authenticating the ID of the person initiating the search…
So let’s keep our fingers crossed that enough safeguard are put into place, so that email “mass marketing” doesn’t become “web 2.0 mass marketing”….
For more on permission marketing, check out the Friday Podcast featuring Aweber education marketing manager Justin Premick.
