Sunnyvale, California — More than a year after announcing what they called the sunset of various properties, Yahoo, the struggling portal for a while now trying to figure out exactly what it is they are offering and how they fit into the new world order taken over by Google. Finally, the company today announced the end date of “MyBlogLog” is May 24, 2011 and recommended users move to Yahoo Pulse.
MyBlogLog, is a subscription service provided by Yahoo that lets bloggers see who their readers are, is another one being cast off as Yahoo tries to become profitable, the company announced this morning in an e-mail to users. As with ones in the past, there will be some layoffs as a result.
Yahoo revealed the news to its users via an email to their user base and by a giant yellow notice at the top of users’ profiles. Also, those who paid for premium services will no longer be charged “after May 24, 2011” and Yahoo will reimburse “the unused portion of your subscription, if any.”
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The Yahoo!MyBlogLog service, which the company acquired in 2007 for $10 million, and had established its standing with about 45,000 blogs by the time of the Yahoo acquisition but has since faced problems as social medial Facebook and microblogging Twitter have taken center stage and attracted large volumes of followers. The MyBlogLog has some pretty interesting features that just could not compete with the larger Social Networking sites.
The move was predestined, as MyBlogLog was part of Yahoo’s now infamous presentation in December that included a slide about the services the company would “sunset”. The leaked presentation also indicated that Yahoo will be shutting down AltaVista, Yahoo Buzz and MyBlogLog, among other properties, although, of those, Yahoo would only confirm that Buzz was on the chopping block.
Moreover, social bookmarking service Delicious is one that is listed in a leaked Yahoo document which showed a list of areas at Yahoo that were to be sold or closed to try and make the company profitable. Delicious is one that has a pretty good following, but with news that it may go away, its future is now in doubt. The company later clarified it was looking for a buyer rather than shutting down the site.
However, the MyBlogLog shut down is part of a continued restructuring of Yahoo’s properties. Under CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo has already pulled down a long list of its services, including GeoCities, Jumpcut and Farechase, and sold or outsourced others, including HotJobs and Yahoo Personals.
Well, digging into the help area, Yahoo states that all content will be deleted and no longer accessible after the shutdown. If you have a MyBlogLog account, Yahoo is recommending users to go through your account and save anything they want to keep. Contacts, emails, blog subscriptions will all be gone after the service closes.
For more information on how to migrate your contacts and information, visit the MyBlogLog help pages.
Certainly, the future for Yahoo does not look that promising with reports of services being shut down, attempts to sell others and announcements of layoffs. In some respects, the sun is really setting on the once powerful web portal and they need to figure out the correct mix for success this year or they may not be around in 2012.