Here I was, just the other day, suggesting that the best way to subvert the system was from within, and ain’t it funny how life suddenly seems to be imitating art, if I may be so bold, so self serving, as to say so…
Long ago Yahoo! lucked out in the search engine wars to the big G, but in what appears to be an attempt to return to the glory days of dot com boom excess and frivolity, they are determined to claw it all back.
Inch by inch, by the looks of it, with a little of the “subversion from within” methodology clandestinely added to the mix.
It’s not exactly fresh-off-the-press news that Yahoo! became owners of MyBlogLog a while ago, but now they are starting to make their ownership very obvious. When I logged in, or rather, tried to login, I was greeted with the following announcement:
MyBlogLog is now a part of the Yahoo! family. Sign up now using your Yahoo! ID.
MBL is now “a Yahoo! service”. Well it’s a good thing I already have a Yahoo! ID, because I don’t know that I would have otherwise bothered signing up for one, even if…
Don’t have a Yahoo! ID? Signing up is easy.
While signing in is easy, or should I say, relatively easy, signing out requires a little more care now. Upon logging off from MBL, or even Flickr, and who knows what other Yahoo! services, you are now diverted to the main Yahoo! landing page.
Like I really want to go there each and every time I finish using a Yahoo! “service”. But otherwise what a clever ploy to increase traffic, take people there whether they want to go or not. Very cunning!
Then, you know, “arrivals” could maybe do a search or two, and get this thing back up there where it once was! The idea is nothing less than a marketing Coup d’etat!
So anyway, it was good while it lasted, but I think in the greater scheme of things, or to be more succinct, on the Hype Cycles of social networks, I fear MBL has had its day.
Is this the beginning of the slide down into that old “Trough of Disillusionment”, and a rather heavy fall from the “Peak of Inflated Expectations”?
What will happen next? Will MBL rally and make it onto the “Slope of Enlightenment”, or might it completely crash through the bottom of that big bad trough?
Too bad a perfectly good blog promotion and networking “service” had to be sacrificed in the name of, um, world domination. Er, world re-domination I mean.
Whatever they’ve done is messing with it big time - it’s as slow as a wet week…. Fortunately, I rarely go there anymore - except to clear all the spam broadcasts.
Yah … they integrated with Yahoo, and I had some serious trouble logging in today as a result. However, apparently it’ll also speed up the widget service :P I’m not a big fan of the redirects though … Digg just updated too in ways to keep people on site. I guess they’re big and essentially monopolies so they can afford to do such things.
It is so slow!!! Hope they get that worked out. And I also hope the widgets do start loading faster. That would be great. I love having them, but I know when I’m stumbling pages it’s annoying how long pages with them take to load!
@ Meg - yep, it takes about half an hour to log in - how’s that for disillisionment?!
@ Kurt - at least logging into digg still happens quickly :)
@ Dana - I’m sure it’s all just teething problems, but I guess that’s one reason I don’t overdo the widgets… they can slow down load times as it is, let alone at a time like this!