MyBlogLog has been taking the blogosphere by storm the past few months, even before the acquisition by Yahoo. However, MyBlogLog is not a recent phenomena, it started out as a blog statistics service by Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson in March of 2005.
I’m a fan of MyBlogLog (TopRank Community) and despite some of the infrastructure issues related to their increased popularity, am very optimistic about what the resources brought on by Yahoo will do for the community.
In order to find out more about MyBlogLog, I contacted CEO Scott Rafer through the MyBlogLog messaging tool and he surprised me not only with a quick reply, but a yes to answering a few questions. I was rather impressed and appreciative of this considering how busy he is right now.
In this quick set of questions Scott talks about how he got involved with MyBlogLog, the acquisition by Yahoo, future enhancements, fighting spam and advice for other budding tech companies with similar aspirations.
First, can you tell us about your background and how you made the transition from Feedster to MyBlogLog? Is it true you connected with Eric via LinkedIn? What was/is your vision for MyBlogLog?
There was 6 months between Feedster (left sept 05) and MyBlogLog (joined Mar 06). They were entirely disconnected. In Jan 06, an investor pal put the idea for a distributed social net into my head. I couldn’t get it out.
As I was trawling around the net over the next few weeks, I kept running across MBL’s click-tags. “AH HA!” It occurred to me how they did what they did, and I reached out to Eric via LinkedIn — we had Sean Bonner of metroblogging in common. I called him up; he got Todd on the phone; and I said, “Do you know what else you can do with that?” They quite reasonably said,” Who are you?”.
It all cascaded from there.
Offering the Feedster 500 a free MyBlogLog pro account was a clever marketing move. What kinds of marketing and promotion tactics were most successful?
The widget made us. From a non-automated perspective, commenting on other people’s blogs relentlessly seems to be the most productive thing.
How many people have signed up so far?
A bit over 50k have profiles.
What rate per month?
The acceleration with Yahoo makes that tough to track. We grow at about 2% a day on average.
How did the acquisition come about?
We started chatting with happy next of Mybloglog users at Yahoo Search Marketing, and then BradleyH got excited at the Web 2.0 Conference.
Now that you’re part of the Yahoo! family, will things change?
More resources, great brand, and more process. A huge net gain. The details are tough to figure out so soon.
I understand MyBloglog Will be part of the Yahoo Developer Network. Does that mean MBL will integrate with any other Yahoo social media services?
We’ve pulled in Flickr pix and will do all we can to keep integrating. Check out kentbrewster.com for a Del.icio.us prototype widget. He blogged about it. We’re running hither and yon in the company, where people have been incredibly welcoming, to offer information and our help.
Are there any infrastructure updates in store? MBL is a bit slow at times.
The widget’s was sucking wind over the weekend but we seem to have fixed that now. Yahoo ops guys are getting all set up to bring us on to their servers soon. From there, we should be in great shape.
What efforts are you making to keep spam out of MBL?
One doesn’t share the details of these things in order to avoid road mapping for that crowd. However, we are continually active trying to remove the incentives to spam without ruining the system for more sincere users. It’s a battle of inches that never ends.
Are there any feature enhancements planned that you can share?
Private label communities like community.techcrunch.com for everyone as soon as we can.
Any advice for other virtual companies with a cool idea that want to get purchased by Yahoo for millions? 🙂
Per Ed Sim and Josh Kopelman, companies are bought not sold. it’s darn inconvenient, but true.
Thanks Scott!
For more info on MyBlogLog, check out the Techcrunch profiles here, this post by Om Malik about the night the sell decision was made, these cool MyBlogLog tools from SoloSEO and Search Engine Journal’s great post about what the acquisition means for MBL and Yahoo.
I wrote about MyBlogLog yesterday, and the very first comment came in from Scott Rafer. Cool – and effective. I’ll be hanging in with the service in spite of the slowdown.
Enjoyed reading the interview here, Lee – and btw, I’m a member of your MyBlogLog community. Yours was one of the first ones I joined.
— Connie (aka ConnieBelle)
Hey Connie, thanks for stopping by!
I wish I could have gotten more, but as you can imaging, Scott is really pressed for time these days. In fact, he was going to wait until 2 weeks from now to do the interview, but then fired off the above on short notice and after a little pleading from me. 🙂
I think it speaks volumes about a company when the CEO is that responsive.
Hey Steve, not spammy at all! Thanks for the link.
Great interview. At the risk of being spammy, I spoke to MyBlogLog co-founder, Eric Marcoullier, last month — right before the Yahoo! buy out.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=45
Lee, sorry to be picky here, but Scott Rafer did not found Feedster. Scott Johnson and myself founded Feedster in early 2003, and Scott Rafer joined us in late 2003.
Hello Francois, and thank you for that clarification. I have updated the post.
Lee – that’s one of the best interviews I’ve read on MBL. Thx.
Lee,
Keep up the great work. It is nice to hear how some of these hot new properties came about.
Take Care,
Bob Lawrence