An email hit my inbox late Friday night I found rather interesting. It was from Ian Kennedy of MyBlogLog telling users in a couple of weeks they’d be launching something called “New with Me” that will aggregate your latest activity on the sites you have listed in your Services there. New profile pages are promised as the aggregation will be merged with the existing profile information you’ve provided. It even promises that lifestreams from your contacts will be there, too.
Strange. Sounds like a familiar sort of application.
It appears as if the change will happen and the aggregation applied whether you want it to or not. If you don’t, you should login and pull those sites off your profile.
The full email is below. Tell me what you think in the comments section. Is Yahoo just ripping off established aggregators like Profilactic? Is this just the direction social media sites are moving? Will you use MyBlogLog more now that there is a more dynamic set of information there for you and your friends? Will you pull your services off so they can’t aggregate your lifestream? The comments are yours.
FULL EMAIL:
It took a long time for word to get out about our changeover to Yahoo! IDs. Lesson learned. This time we’re reaching out to you via old-fashioned email.
In a couple weeks, we’ll be launching a new feature called New with Me. This feature will use the URLs on the Services tab of your MyBlogLog profile to aggregate your latest activity on sites such as Twitter, Last.fm, Digg, and YouTube. As a result, your profile page will look different - publicly available updates from the services you have listed will be merged with your existing information. Your latest Flickr photos, Last.fm tracks, and YouTube videos, will all be in one place. Updates from your contacts on MyBlogLog will be merged and available as well. Simply put, the New with Me feature will transform your static profile into a dynamic one.
MyBlogLog respects your privacy. We will aggregate and display only information that is publicly available. If you’re uncomfortable with MyBlogLog aggregating and displaying publicly available information from a particular service, you can remove that service from your profile at any time.
Of course, we hope you’re excited about the broader distribution of everything you produce on the Web. If you use any of the sites featured in the Services tab, you know the value of being able to display all your activity in one place.
Your MyBlogLog profile, About Me widget, and Email Signature were the first steps in distributing your Web identity. New with Me is the next, pulling together a unified picture of who you are on the distributed social Web. We have lots of cool things planned for this feature — I hope you’ll use it to help build the next generation of the Web.
For details, please check out our FAQ on this feature.
As always, check our blog for the latest news from us.
See you online!
Ian Kennedy
Product Manager, MyBlogLog
Technorati Tags: MyBlogLog, lifestreaming, social media, Profilactic, aggregators, lifestream aggreagator
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Jason Falls is the director of social media explorer for Doe-Anderson, a brand-building agency in Louisville, Ky., specializing in building brand enthusiasts. A public relations professional by trade and writer by craft, Falls is co-founder of the Social Media Club Louisville. This blog is his own, contains his opinions and observations and does not necessarily reflect those of Doe-Anderson or its clients.
Jason — I’d like to address a couple of your points as the co-founder of MyBlogLog and a FORMER MBL/YHOO employee.
We hade the first version of New With Me circulating in private beta in late April of 2007. We were not allowed to launch because it was apparently in conflict with another project in development elsewhere in the organization that was due to launch a year later. One of many reasons I left
It appears that Yahoo is finally (and perhaps belatedly) shaking off its culture of failure to launch, and the team has finally successfully lobbied to launch the product. They kept the faith while I could not.
As such, it’s rather insulting to the team to suggest that it’s something that they just ripped off. There are a number of great aggregators out there (Profilactic is one of the best), Hopefully MBL’s feed will find a warm reception in conjunction with all the other services it provides.
February 16th, 2008