Yahoo shuts down MyBlogLog – What is next in line?

MyBlogLog is a popular service among bloggers. It served mainly as a social network for bloggers. This probably made it very exclusive and quite active.  It had 45,000 blogs subscribing to it and in 2007 catastrophe struck. No, it did not shut down but was bought by Yahoo for about $10 million.

Sure enough, Yahoo yesterday announced that MyBlogLog is closing down on May 24, 2011. If you read on, how Yahoo’s Empire crashed from $100 billion to $22 billion, you will not be surprised that yet another service from Yahoo is shutting down.

MyBlogLog announced it is shutting down the service on 24th May, 2011. It did this through an email. Here is the screen-shot the email sent to us.

Which service will Yahoo shut down next?

Inadvertently Yahoo had let out an inside company secret that it would be shutting down certain services. The screenshot below was what actually sparked off a big debate over closing down Delicious.

This did have MyBlogLog included in the list of Yahoo services that will be discontinued.  After the anger and debate over Delicious, Yahoo claimed they will only sell Delicious and not shut it down. No, such luck for MyBlogLog.

The services next in line to be shut down are:

1. Yahoo Bookmarks: After Yahoo purchased Delicious, I still do not know why it has its own bookmarking service. Ideally it should have been merged with Delicious.
2. AlltheWeb: A popular search engine and at a time had advantages over Google. Once Yahoo took over, some features like FTP search and direct image search were discontinued. Along with this, it started using Yahoo’s database. Now it seem destined to be yet another shutdown from Yahoo.
3. Yahoo Buzz!: A service that combines social bookmarking and official syndication when it came to news publishing. This we can see was similar to Digg. The service never kicked up a big storm and seems like another one riding into the sunset.
4. Altavista: If you searched on the internet before Google came into the picture you probably did it with Alta Vista. The popular search engine was bought by Yahoo in 2003. I guess this service in a few days will not be doing any searching.

It is a pity indeed that so much could have been of these great services but unfortunately they were caught in the strange case of Yahoo. Yahoo seems to buy great companies and services and turns them into dust. A common thread behind all these failures are that none of them grew when it came to innovation, once they were part of Yahoo.

Do drop in your comments and views.