Yahoo At The Center Of The Social Universe: But Where's The Integration?
Yahoo strikes again, buying up MyBlogLog for a reported $10M:
[from paidContent.org]Bradley Horowitz, VP of product strategy at Yahoo, said Mybloglog will likely remain branded as a separate entity, but Yahoo users will be able to register on it with their Yahoo password. The reader communities will soon be able to access Yahoo services, like the Flickr photo site or the Yahoo Answers information service, to their groups.
MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer will now work under Horowitz.
Others report that Scott will be working for Chad Dickerson, and that MyBlogLog will become part of the Yahoo Developers Network.
What is apparent is that Yahoo is becoming the leading advocate of social applications, and could really be onto something if they could figure out how to jigger it all together in some way. As it is, though, Flickr, Upcoming.org, del.icio.us, Messenger, and now MyBlogLog are amazingly unintegrated. There is a kind of magic in just lumping things together, I guess, but wouldn't it be more interesting to have something more in common than a Yahoo login?
It's odd, both Google and Yahoo are atrocious at integration - at least Yahoo has some excuse as their buying vs. Google who is generally building.
In this case I think it's a great acquisition - at the end of the day MyBlogLog is the ideal stats-type package for Flickr (something it's sorely lacking). I'd love to get a lot more info on how my Flickr photos/pages are viewed and by who but there's just no option.
Posted by: Ryan Coleman | January 09, 2007 at 07:25 AM
I think there's a ton of evidence that we're integrating these things in a deliberate thoughtful fashion (as opposed to just jamming them together.) Some of my favorite examples:
Flickr - Upcoming: Every upcoming event now has an integration with Flickr. Rather than scrawling the canonical tag for the event on a whiteboard, upcoming autogenerates the tag. This leads to a "digital scrapbook" for every event. Check out the Flickr photos (in upcoming!) from last year's Hack Day.
Flickr - delicious: Every photo page now includes "Save to Delicious". Go here and look about 4/5ths down the page on the right side. Moreover when the reference is saved, delicious is type-aware and provides a thumbnail of the flickr reference.
Flickr - Yahoo! Maps: We've got nearly 10m photos geotagged. Check out this query for a fun example.
Etc. etc. etc. "Small pieces loosely joined." Please don't mistake our willingness to give these great properties autonomy and idependent identity for "lack of integration." They are being sewn together in ways that makes sense... in ways that serve the users (as opposed to a top-down corporate mandate.) I like it this way!
Posted by: Bradley Horowitz | January 09, 2007 at 08:00 AM
Hi Stowe,
Just to clarify, Scott will report to Bradley and the rest of the team will report to me. It's a great team, and we're really excited about bringing them into the fold!
Posted by: Chad Dickerson | January 09, 2007 at 10:40 AM
"As it is, though, Flickr, Upcoming.org, del.icio.us, Messenger, and now MyBlogLog are amazingly unintegrated."
And Blo.gs is just. plain. dead. yahoo bought it, then killed it. Or if there's a resurrection of it, they're sure as heck not talking about it at all.
Posted by: Susan Kitchens | January 09, 2007 at 12:22 PM