As I was working on LewisEmpire.com last night I decided to take a few minutes and surf around MyBlogLog for a few minutes. At the stroke of 1:00am my profile was automatically logged out and I was required to spend the next 45 minutes trying to figure out what was going on.
I got a big screen that said Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog and that I needed to login with my Yahoo account. I don’t usually use Yahoo so I went through all my email and finally found one from 2004 that showed my username. Blah, Blah, Blah, I finally got my account open and then spent the next 10 minutes ‘merging’ my profiles.
Through this experience I lost:
- 45 minutes of my life
- My Avatar (short term loss)
- 45 minutes of sleep (same as above)
- Some of my last respect for Yahoo!
I understand that they want to become bigger, buy my personal information as well as the connections I’ve made online. I’m OK with that. But please don’t make using a service that I’ve been a member of since June 25th, 2007 (long term in the blogging world) a hassle!
When I tried to upload my Avatar again I was AGAIN referred back to a Yahoo page. OK. I get it! You bought MyBlogLog. Can’t they just do the biometric eye scan through my video thing here and approve me to join Debo Hobo’s community? (Can you believe after reading her blog for months I’ve never joined the community? Have you all joined mine?)
Yahoo Drowning Itself?
OK. I admit, I really don’t hate Yahoo but I’ve got to say that they could put a little more effort into some of the products that they offer.
Let’s look at two examples:
1. The Yahoo Search Marketing Screen:
2. The Google Analytics Screen:
I don’t want to nag Yahoo but I’m pretty sure the top one could be done by my 2 1/2 year old. Remember: I’m paying for the top one (through search marketing) and the second one is free.
Here’s one more thing. I know that people have been trashing Google for their page rank reduction lately. (You may have noticed that my PageRank dropped from a 10/10 down to a 0/10 without me even noticing at first. ) Wouldn’t this be the perfect time for Yahoo to make it’s run at the blogging community? Take advantage of all the crap that Google is throwing out and get their act together (if anyone at Google or Yahoo is reading this please give me an awesome ranking or at least send back the bribery checks).
Obviously they are doing something wrong. Here’s the share prices for both Google and Yahoo as a comparison to each other:
Please, please, please Yahoo don’t wreck MyBlogLog. I just got in there and simply don’t have the time to figure out another way to show my Avatar: 
PS. Google broke $600 per share. It’s IPO was at just over $85. How does that make you feel? Anyone want to guess where it will go next?
If you Yahoo and you know it join my Feed.
Tags: google, business education, yahoo!, blogging, business blog, online marketing
Sometimes I forget to join a friend’s community because there’s that 15 max limit (I wish they’d increase it). But there should be an automatic thing with MBL (if it’s selected) where it’ll join the community automatically after you’ve visited 10 times.
Posted by Joanne | October 11, 2007, 12:46 amI didn’t like having to sign up for a Yahoo account to get into my MBL account either. Don’t they already have all the necessary info from when I signed up with MBL? The claim was that it was to make things easier. For Yahoo, not me!
I think Ask.com has a better shot at making a run at Google. Or another newcomer on the scene, that I will discuss in a future blog post. (Unless someone else beats me to it…)
Posted by dcr | October 11, 2007, 9:55 amIs the minimum for MBL automatic join 10 visits? Or can you set lower than that?
Posted by david | October 11, 2007, 9:55 amJeepers! Thanks for joining my Community. I went through that whole Yahoo thing a few weeks ago, had to locate the correct username as well. ( I have tons of them for Yahoo answers. My web address is always the correct answer)
Anyhoo-thanks for the linkback as well:)
Posted by Debo Hobo | October 11, 2007, 11:06 amThey must have changed it in the past month or so. My login was obviously stored in a cookie or something because after the first time I never had to login again.
What a mess to go through. They don’t even give you an explanation as to what’s going on. They just say you need a Yahoo login to proceed!
Posted by Lewis Empire | October 11, 2007, 11:48 amHi David,
I saw that you wrote about this earlier. Can you tell me where I go to set the automatic join?
Lewis
Posted by Lewis Empire | October 11, 2007, 11:49 amYou have probably been signed in for the last few months. Wait until you are required to login again. My advice is to get your Yahoo username and password ready!
Posted by Lewis Empire | October 11, 2007, 11:50 amIsn’t the limit 15 per day? If not, then what’s the point of limiting the number of communities you can join?
Posted by Lewis Empire | October 11, 2007, 11:52 amI’m so sorry about this! We could have done a better job letting people know this change was coming and in hindsight should have used the email address we have in our registration database to get in touch. Being bloggers, we kept most communication on our blog where we had been talking about the switchover to Yahoo IDs for a several weeks.
http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/09/yahoo-ids-anoth.html
Hindsight is always 20/20
Ian
Product Manager, MyBlogLog
Posted by Ian Kennedy | October 12, 2007, 1:44 amGoogle Analytic’s are changing to reflect the new web trends, and I’m sorry to hear that you lost your ranking. You are still one of my most favourite blogs out there…..
Posted by Sharon | October 14, 2007, 10:14 amHey Sharon, Sorry for the confusion. I’ve only been blogging since June so I’ve never received a page rank. I said that I dropped from 10/10 to 0/10. I guess I’m still wishing I had that 10/10 in the first place!
Thanks for the great comment!
Posted by Lewis Empire | October 14, 2007, 3:45 pmWhew! And here I thought, I had to be nervous about dropping in page rank also. ….
Google is eliminating the page rank thing (from what I hear) and it would have been neat to see how far up your blog could go. It’s one of the best ones I have come across.
Posted by Sharon | October 15, 2007, 5:20 am