MyBlogLog was a wildly innovative service that grew fast after launching and was acquired in January 2007 by Yahoo! for $10 million. It made a deal with users: give us your personal information and we'll show you the faces of people who read your blog. That was a compelling offer and the resulting data amassed could have proven invaluable, had Yahoo! chosen to cultivate it and a developer ecosystem around it. That potential was so great, in fact, that sunset for MyBlogLog is downright tragic. It's also likely to anger bloggers all around the web.
According to Read Write Web Yahoo is going to shut down MyBlogLog 5 years after it was founded.
The article has a nice quote from the co-founder explaining that acquired services need strong executive champions in the ranks of the buyer to survive and flourish.
Stepping in to this vacuum is the great Typepad profile widget which can be seen on the upper right of my blog. Built into the service it is helping me gain new readers and people to follow on a daily basis. The Typepad BlogIt button, another Typepad feature, has also caused me to drop Delicious, another formerly great service that has languished under Yahoo too.