I'll be posting this to the Yahoo developer blog, right after I get done proofreading it, in response to their "Mybloglog?" post. Yes, that's its title, and the question mark seems fitting. My comment:
"Is it, indeed, closing down?"
Today, it doesn't seem to be, but somebody does seem to want to kill it. Remember what we saw out of Yahoo, prior to the closing of Yahoo 360? The way basic maintenance was neglected and problem reports were responded to with nothing but handholding form letters? Take a look at Mybloglog, today. Go to the Mybloglog suggestion board, and take a look at the spam
http://suggestions.yahoo.com/?prop=mybloglog
One user in particular, who calls himself "Ajay", has been flooding the board with spam for months. I've reported this. No action, not even a response has followed.
Try creating a community on Mybloglog, as I did last night. Once again, we're seeing the eternal "refresh pending" - one goes to the "settings" page for the new community, which still doesn't have a screenshot, and finds that one can't upload a screenshot of one's own -
Screenshot not available (refresh pending)
It's almost noon, here in Chicago, and I'm still getting the refresh pending message. I wrote to Support, last night, which shouldn't have had any difficulty solving this problem, because Tilly told us what was going wrong, last year, when this problem arose
http://getsatisfaction.com/mybloglog/
topics/refresh_picture_pending_for_over_two_day_now
"Oops! Sorry about that, totally my bad. Before I left for the weekend I accidentally unplugged the screenshot robot. *blush* Its back up and running now, you should be all jet set :)"
But this year, the Mybloglog team just couldn't be bothered. All I got back from "Cid" was one of Yahoo's form letters
"Hello,
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! MyBlogLog.
I apologize for the trouble you're having with updating your MyBlogLog community screenshot. I realize how frustrating this must be.
This is a known issue and our Engineering Team is working to resolve it. If you have any additional questions or concerns please let us know as soon as possible.
Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! MyBlogLog.
Regards,
Cid
Yahoo! MyBlogLog Customer Care
Mybloglog General Tech T1"
I responded to Cid, providing a link to Tilly's post, and here we are on the next day, and no movement has followed. The plan seems to be to let the service fall apart so badly that people give up on using it. That way, instead of having to deal with a huge, public outcry all at once, Yahoo whittles down the user base gradually, so that only an ignorably small group is voicing its discontent at any one time. What we end up seeing is the offering of deliberately bad service as a corporate strategy.
Mybloglog seems to work best as an update notification service. My advice would be to start offering Feedburner as an alternative for those wishing to subscribe to one's blog. No, one can't use Feedburner to tie all of one's content together. Feedburner is definitely not as cool as Mybloglog was before Yahoo started fouling it up, doing to it as it seems determined to do to all of its acquisitions. But Feedburner is a lot likelier to be around two years from now.
Oh - and Mr.Yeh, if you're reading this ... I remember that cute little thing you did with the comment editing a few months ago, and will be cutting and pasting my comment, as is, to my blog. If you try doing the same thing again, don't think that you'll be fooling anybody.
Note: After I posted this, I saw this message:
"Your comment has been received. To protect against malicious comments, I have enabled a feature that allows your comments to be held for approval the first time you post a comment. I'll approve your comment when convenient; there is no need to re-post your comment."
One might note that on the very same post, one finds a comment from "Alex Afdhal" that is nothing more than an advertisement for his travel service. So, apparently spam is OK, but honest criticism is not, in Mr.Yeh's world.
