Mybloglog.com has been getting quite a bit of attention, particularly by several noted A-list bloggers (AVC, Read/Write, Techcrunch, Calacanis, and others). With all of that exposure, membership has rising (most likely fairly dramatically).

The concept is terrific. I’ve had it up on my blog since the beginning. I like to see who is looking at my blog, who is commenting (whenever that starts), and the service gives me a chance to explore other blogs, mostly by people that I ultimately find interesting to read. Most of this is free. The freemium model at its finest. I can also see limited stats about where people came from, what they clicked on, and what outgoing links they looked at. Unfortunately, after the trial period, you have to pony up $3 to see real-time stats, otherwise, you are relegated to looking at yesterday’s results. Which is strange, since there are countless other free services that can provide you the same statistics in real-time. It would be nice if they sought an alternate strategy to make money and gave me back the real-time stats

With the influx of new signups from all this exposure, comes the inevitable (and there was some of it before this coverage hit): spam. That’s right, spammers will start rolling in, joining communities, posting comments, trying to add in links to profiles, making a mess of the whole thing. How mybloglog.com responds will be interesting to follow.

The growing pains are about to begin. Figuring out where to place advertising (I do not think this freemium model is going to hold water) will be a challenge. More importantly, however, is how to integrate value-added advertising, which I think can happen. I would consider allowing a small advert to be a part of the mybloglog widget on my blog in exchange for getting the real-time stats back.

Oh the irony: just received an email from mybloglog.com letting me know that they’ve automatically added me to a community. They claim:

Part of what makes MyBlogLog so special is our ability to automatically add you to communities in which you have shown a repeated interest.

Funny, I never recall visiting the site, nor that community that they just added me to. That is like Netflix adding movies to the top of my queue based on other movies that I watched or looked at, thinking I liked it. Looks like the spam has already started. The community I was just automatically added to is called “quick online tips”. Great, thank you and no thanks. I also do not see anywhere in the preferences how I can “unsubscribe” from this auto-community-joining feature.

UPDATE: Thank you Eric and Rafer for looking into the above. I have serious egg on my face, as I did in fact visit the site above during my travels around the net. I thoroughly enjoy the service and am happy that they took my claim (even though it turned out that I am an idiot here) seriously and followed up. Thanks guys.

Technorati : blogs, mybloglog, mybloglog.com

How many non-copyrighted videos do they actually have in their arsenal, anyone know?

Technorati : google, gootube, youtube

Is it just me or do you get a lot of spam email from MySpace. Ok, maybe not directly from MySpace, but it comes from “@groups.myspace.com”. Here is a nice one I got this morning:

Hi ,

You have been invited to join the $300 – $1,100 Daily Income Club group on MySpace.

I’ve also been asked to join a top models group, a group about Viagra, and a few others that I probably shouldn’t mention.

It would be nice there was a mechanism to report spam to MySpace. My only option in the email is this:

At MySpace we care about your privacy. We have sent you this notification to facilitate your use as a member of the MySpace.com service. If you don’t want to receive emails like this to your external email account in the future, change your Account Settings to “Do not send me notification emails.”

That is really nice. So I can completely turn off one of the social network features of MySpace and receive nothing. Terrific.

Everyone is focusing on GooTube and their copyright problems. How about focusing on MySpace and their spam problem? Anyone have any numbers on this, they have to be one of the leading senders of spam in the world right now. Looking at Technorati, there are a few posts tagged “myspace+spam”. I’d like to see more. My current favorites:

MySpace is Spam 2.0

Murdoch does Spam

Technorati : email, myspace, myspace+spam, spam

nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah… My site is bigger than your site. My videos are bigger than your videos.

Is Rupert kidding himself here? I can understand that MySpace’s video play is big, and getting bigger everyday. As Pete Cashmore points out, it isn’t that hard to build a product and shove it down the throats of millions of members and not expect it to take off. That sure as heck doesn’t mean that it is going to win out in the end. I am not even sure what “winning” really gets you here anyway. You already have the traffic and I feel bad that now you have to come up with copycat ways to keep it. Here is a short list of other copycat ideas that Fox Interactive can come up with and then claim to crush the competition when the next useless pageview data comes out:

1. MySpaceNews – a digg clone

2. MySpaceAuctions – new Myspace run auction site that will topply Ebay in only 90 days or your money back!

3. MySpaceOrati – combing the blogosphere and compiling it all in a nice way.

4. MySpaceLines – RSS reader, MySpace style (i.e. very, very ugly).

Ok, that’s enough. You get the point.

But bigger (which I read to mean bigger/better/stronger/faster) than YouTube in 60 days? Come on.

Technorati : myspace, myspace video, video, youtube

Run. Run away now while you still can.

Seriously, a social network site for fans of sneakers? We already have stupid sites like this. They have names like Dogster, Catster, Hamster, Horseter…

The last thing I need to do is look at pictures of smelly, old sneakers. Beyond that, they want me to vote for my favorite pair…. uh, I vote for the ratty old pair of Chuck Taylors over those New Balance kicks. Apparently, Nike is advertising on the site. Hey why not.

I am just waiting for WearJeans.com to come out next.

Technorati Tags: sneakerplay

Look at MySpace. It is so web 1.0 in its construct it isn’t even funny. Ok, so they have their own video player (copycats), and, oooh, look they even have an embedded flash music player. They have blog functionality, sorta. Otherwise, its a badly constructed mish-mash of crap. What makes it fun? All these flash modules, widgets, flash codes (call them what you will), that everyone and their mother (not skeptic’s though I bet) are making.

Feeding the beast? I think the beast is feeding on everyone else. Without these widgets, without YouTube, MySpace would be nothing. The future of MySpace depends on cool services that plug into them. Just like people pimp their rides, with cool stereos, and every other after-market part that is available to them. It is fine for MySpace to be the aggregator-default for all of this stuff, but for them to publicly put the widget-makers on notice is obviously naive at best.

MySpace should open up an API (a la Facebook and others), embrace the development community at large and all of these other smart people and work together. Otherwise, they are going to find themselves SOL in the near future.

Maybe YouTube should actually turn around and block the ability for anyone to post the videos they so graciously host for all of us on MySpace.

Suddenly it is seeming less and less like MySpace and more like TheirSpace.

Technorati Tags: myspace, widgets

I logged out fairly frustrated and decided “well, that’s it”. Haven’t been back since.

So it was a small surprise when I got an alert email from Linden Labs, Second Life’s creators (man would Orwell have a field day with this Big Brother setup).  They needed to tell me that their servers had been hacked and most likely my personal data, including maybe my credit card info (I don’t believe I gave it to them, though) and most certainly my paypal account information (I immediately changed the password) had been exposed.

And that’s been it on the communication front from Linden Labs. I gotta tell you. If that happened to my local bank, I can pretty much guarantee you that I would have some more follow-up then just some lame press release on a website and a half-hearted alert email.

Kind of funny that this isn’t getting much play in the blogosphere… a few of the normal suspects have weighed in (Techcrunch for instance). All in all this is just another ho-hum-hack, for most folks. I see a bigger problem. What happens when Facebook is hacked, or how about Myspace?

Dear Second Life- Get a life. I am not sure what you are cooking up over there, but maybe an apology to the people who are building this Second Life for you is in order.

Users of both popular web 2.0 social networks are up-in-arms over what they perceive as anti-nation practices.

Growing pains of a young nation? Heck, you could argue that the combined strength of each site (and its user base) is greater than a lot of developing nations. What happens when a nation revolts in the real world? Chaos, fighting, and ultimately a regime change.

The problem in Digg’s case is the perception that the top 30 posters are involved in a “Digg-Ring”, digging stories to the front page faster than most of us can say the word “post”. A call for Digg to release its algorithm has gone unanswered, although that would probably only cause further abuse.  The debate rages about how Digg should be used. The TOS does discourage gaming the system, but in the end Digg can be looked at for many as Delicious on steroids. Simple social bookmarking, with some added functionality like voting for stories.
Kevin Rose answers several questions about gaming Digg.

Still the middle class Diggers are not satisfied. Is this really what web 2.0 is about. On the social network front, it should be about what the users want, which as Kevin and the rest of the Diggnation brass are finding out is not an easy thing to stay on top of.

Will the angry Digg Swarm of middle class Diggers win out? Or is the whole thing going to crumble to pieces?

As Whitey04 puts it so well:

Web 2.0 my ass. More like 0.9 with a great color scheme. 

Amen Whitey04, amen.

Rojo scooped up by Typepad (which you can read about here, here, here, here, and here)… ok so I didnt link the “here’s” but would you click on them anyway?

Really what’s the point in me investing any of my time with these 2.0 sites? The current trend is that they’ll be scooped up and re-purposed before I even get my 100th friend. What’s next? Digg being bought out by the New York Times (count on it) and completely overhauled and littered with advertising?

Just like my TV viewing experience. I can’t start watching a new show anymore… been burned too many times in the past. 4 episodes in, just when I am digging a new show (like Love Monkey), and BAM… they pull the plug on it and it later shows up on E! Well, I don’t want to watch it on E!, especially 4 months later when I’ve forgotten all about it.

So Web 2.0 company’s out there, please stop the beta releases, the world is not your test bed.

News Feed and Mini Feed, allow users to get a quick view of what their friends are up to, including relationship changes, groups joined, pictures uploaded, etc., in a streaming news format.

Seems fine to me… one problem here Facebook guys… if 100,000 people (and probably counting) are up-in-arms about this, wouldn’t it have made some sense to actually act like a social networking community and ask your users before releasing this on the world?

How about a little good old GoogleBETA (thanks Skeptic) testing?

The funny thing about all these social networking sites that are being released on the world every day — they are in it for the money, users-be-damned.

Hey Facebook– web 2.0, what is it good for?

Seems in this case it is for taking the social out of social network. I am guessing for most college kids these days, Facebook in a couple years will be about as well-known as those stupid long distance phone cards we had to use back in the 90’s.

update: heck yeah, Fred. A-listers like this are about to get long-tailed out of dodge.