Month: January 2007
MyBlogLog to Yahoo!
MyBlogLog is the cool site that lets you make communities out of the people that visit your website. We’re listed there, and if you are registered, you’ll probably be able to see your photo down the right-hand side of the site somewhere.
Well, like all cool Web2.0 startups, they’ve been bought up. And like Flickr, del.icio.us and countless others, the purchaser is Yahoo!. Here’s some details from the MyBlogLogBlog:
Yahoo! is going to put loads of resources into MyBlogLog and help us roll out a ton of new features. Plus, we’re moving to their infrastructure, which should help with those occasional slowdowns.We are not going to become one of those corporate casualties that never make another step forward. We are hard at work on the custom communities and soon everyone will be able to skin their community to look like their own blog or site.
Good for them! Mike Arrington reckons the deal was worth something like $10 million. He goes on:
The fact that MyBlogLog will be in the Yahoo Developers Network is a good signal. Yahoo’s recent acquisitions have been handled pretty well from a user-care standpoint, and it looks like they’ll be taking a similar approach here. Bradley did say that eventually users will be able to log in with their Yahoo IDs, though. That will expand the potential user base significantly.
Congratulations to the MyBlogLog team. This thing took off like a rocket and never looked back, and we are a proud member.
Hopefully MyBlogLog will be able to continue to grow within Yahoo! and provide an even better service in the future. As for what Yahoo! get out of it, well, I wonder if all the recent interest in site metrics has something to do with it…
Wetpaint
Wetpaint is a hosted wiki service – more like Wikia than PBwiki, in that it’s probably suited to community sites. The difference between Wetpaint and Wikia though, is that Wetpaint looks good.
Mike Arrington and Zoli Erdos both mention it today, which is how I came by it. Arrington reports the $9.5 million funding they’ve just received. He goes on:
Wetpaint’s key competitor, Wikia, has had more traction with users according to Alexa and Compete statistics, and claims 2.5 million page views per day. Wetpaint doesn’t disclose page views, but CEO Ben Elowitz told me they are “doubling quicker than every 2 months.” Wetpaint has a much more newbie-friendly user interface than Wikia, and is targeting a different audience. Frankly, it’s just a lot more pleasant to look at a typical Wetpaint site than a Wikia one, although the content on Wikia is often much deeper than the equivalent on Wetpaint. Wetpaint says they now have 150,000 unique wikis and over 2.5 million pieces of content contributed by users since launching last June.
Zoli adds his thoughts:
Wetpaint isn’t really just a wiki, it’s a wiki – blog – forum hybrid. Even novice users can just happily type away and create attractive pages with photos, videos, tagging …etc. without the usual learning curve. These pages can be shared, other users can contribute, entire communities can grow and thrive – in fact that’s what it’s all about: online community creation.
So what’s it like? Great! It’s dead simple to sign up to create a new wiki, and it also makes it easy to add all sorts of content. You can see some of the sort of things that are possible at Wetpaint Central, the support wiki.
There are plenty of templates you can choose from, including text pages, photo galleries, calendars, schedules and event details. Every page can be commented on, so a sense of community interaction is easy to achieve.
I can think of plenty of uses to put Wetpaint to. Heartily recommended.
That was easy!
In the end, I just used the same theme as hyprtext, but changed a few things around. I like the look, but all the widgets I’m using might make the place look a little cluttered.
Any feedback gratefully received…
Ch ch ch Changes
Things will be going a bit wobbly ’round these parts over the next day or two. Will be upgrading to 2.06 of WordPress, and sorting myself out with a new theme.
Wish me luck!