Will MyBlogLog Survive Yahoo!’s Management Review?

In recent weeks there’s been talk on the blogsphere, especially from a recent ReadWriteWeb post, about the imminent closure of the popular MyBlogLog blogging widget/social network. With the charge being led by bloggers irate that their beloved blog widget might be soon a footnote in Wikipedia’s logs, are they missing the bigger picture?

Looking at Yahoo’s (NasdaqGS:YHOO) financial report for the three months ending 30 September, it’s clear that the troubled search engine is starting to see a ray of light at the end of the tunnel, reporting net income of $186 million on revenue of $1.575 billion, a sharp contrast from last December’s quarterly loss of $303 million.

It would appear that this past July’s tie-up with Microsoft is starting to bear fruit. With Microsoft focused on the technology elements of algorithmic and paid search services,  Yahoo is free to focus on its role as exclusive worldwide sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers (i.e.: adCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing). This is going to consume much of Yahoo’s “system resources” if it’s going to work out.

With a long way to go to catch up to Google’s coattails, especially with its dominant position in both organic and paid search, the top guns at Yahoo appear to be making a smart move  to focus on search engine and its associated pay-per-click income stream. This also means that “side projects” like Yahoo’s integrated communications portal 360 and social network Mash have been canned before they made it out the Beta stage gates. Next on the cards, possibly MyBlogLog.

Having bought the then-startup for a steal at $10 million, it would be  a waste to close it down now, as it had done earlier  with its “Auctions” portal site.

If there’s any doubt where Yahoo’s priorities lie, I’ve known several experienced Yahoo managers internally transferred from their social media positions to the search engine’s core operations or its developer network over the last two years. The resulting voids in the social media business units have been filled by second stringers or new hires. The consequence? The rollout of new features has slowed significantly, or chugged along with decrepit (by internet standards) features. This has ironically resulted in the archetypal “poor user experience” so despised by the search engines themselves. Every iTom, iDick and iHarry has fired up their blogspot or wordpress blogs to post a rant or two, or three.

But if it’s a matter of the internet’s third largest website survive the current state of economic uncertainty, what’s losing a couple of popular websites among friends? If Yahoo management decides to focus on the company’s core business of providing search engine results and bringing in cash flow to keep the business going, what’s a few rants on a couple of popular blogs, right?

Still, it is a pity to see some key features, like MyBlogLog’s Pro Stats, which provided idiot-proof analytics for bloggers with a simple yet detailed framework, listing referring urls, on-site urls and, outgoing urls that the most technophobic and neophyte blogger could comprehend.

Maybe the MyBlogLog development team could have incorporated Yahoo Search Marketing text or image results within its community site or even within the widget itself. But it appears the MBL might’ve been a branding play, hampered by the lack of a viable business model and difficulty with integration into Yahoo’s core search model. As time will shortly tell, MBL might have overstayed its welcome.

A decade from now, historians will gaze back and determine if it was prescience or foolishness for Yahoo to have dropped the MBL ball, even while Google started incorporating real-time social network updates into its search results. I might even look back at my blog logs to see if they are right.

Disclosure Note: Andrew Wee is a member of MyBlogLog’s advisory board