I always tell people to prepare as best they can for success. In one of my favorite books Lucky or Smart?: Secrets to an Entrepreneurial Life(which I listen to on audio course cause I cant read a book) the author drives home the point many times that they key to success is being prepared for it. Some people call this “luck”. Also in the book the author talks about how everyone gets there turn at success (lucky) but if you are not ready when it comes your way then it passes you by and you are not able to capitolize on it.
A.D.D. MOMENT – This reminds me of one of my pet peeves how people wish me luck.. I know in todays society its just polite to say How are you doing? How was your day? Good luck! and not really give 2 craps about the response but you just say the words to be nice. Well when people tell me “Ohh wow your lucky!” or “Hey good luck with that” it kind of pisses me off cause its like there is some force involved that I have no control over. Really one of the biggest insults you can give a person is to say “wow you are so lucky”. I work my ass off… luck has nothing to do with it.
OK back on track-
Anyway today that brings me to my point which is MyBlogLog. I loved it, I used it, I gave them feedback but now between the url spamming, javascript exploits, avatar spam, slow load times its more of a hassel and risk then it is a cool widget. This reminds me a lot of YPN before they solved there scaleability issues. I know most bloggers could care about down time but as Jeremy Zawodney recently pointed out it can be a pain in the ass…
The last draw really was when a friend of mine overseas was telling me how my blog loads so incredibly slow for him. After doing some checking we figured out it was mybloglog and it was being redirected to something that never loaded but hung my blog from loading for him (probably geotargeting).
Also there is the whole privacy issue… they are collecting a ASSTON of data from users.
Anyway… its clear MyBlogLog was never really prepared for the success it has achieved. This is good and bad… its good for the boys who made millions off there product by selling to Yahoo!. Its bad that now that its in Yahoo!’s hands these things just cant be “fixed” but instead now have to go through the man for changes or fixes. And to add more fuel now spammers are just getting around to taking a look at all the juicy exploits mybloglog has to offer them.
I like you MyBlogLog and I wish you the best of luck.
About the author...
Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2415 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
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{ 27 comments… read them below or add one }
BAMM – Nice post Jeremy – I 100% agree with your ADD moment. Being a successful entrepreneur has very little to do with luck and everything to do with being talented and diligent. Winning a lottery is lucky – finding a niche and being a first mover or an innovator especially when everyone else cannot see the potential is what it is all about. As for my MyBlogLog you are also correct – just like that interview you did a while back with Matt Mullenweg when there was a comment that they should have held out for more and Matt said “Nahh they got out at the right time�. Thousands of users – manageable – millions of users – a little bit harder to do. I wish them well and hope that the technical due diligence did not have a claw back/performance clause in it post acquisition.
Later
Well not that is was acquired by Yahoo it should be able to solve the scalability problems at least.
very true, i deleted the widget the day before yesterday. don’t need “free iphone” adds on my site. and i didn’t like the fact to leave massive tarces on the web, when i saw my everytime i visited a blog. kind of scared me.
Well its a good/bad thing. Most of the time scaleability just means adding more hardware (If you have a good system in place) being how relatively cheap hardware is going to make much of a difference (money wise)
Now time wise it sucks cause now that its owned by a corporation nobody will be able to do piss without a change management proccess which takes so much time. Its why I left the corporate world (well that and I got fired) cause I could not deal with the time it takes to do the simplest things.
Crappy widgets and architecture are the same reason techcrunch blew (blows) up. Yahoo will never properly fix MBL, consider it dead.
I have noticed some spam coming through from MBL but still like the service in general Jez. I take it you will be removing the ‘Shoemoney Posse’?
Well, you complained about the MyBlogLog widget slowing down your load times and yet I see you still have it on this site. I know, cause I just saw my smiling face.
doing some testing to see how much load it ads in optimal conditions… looks like 2 seconds on average
Your test results are going to depend on how fast their server is loading at the time. I noticed earlier today that my site was loading very slowly and each time it was because it was waiting for the MyBlogLog widget to finish loading.
I agree with you that it slows the site down, just thought I’d rib you a little since you still had it on your page.
I have become very frustrated with their lack of customer support as well and that’s probably due to being taken over by Yahoo. My community is up to 34 members and yet I have yet to be added to the ‘H’ category listing or the cloud where other sites with far fewer members are listed.
Thanks to MyBlogLog you can’t visit topless celebrity blogs without everyone knowing it… oops did I say that out loud?
I agree with your ADD moment too, I believe luck + preparation = success and people seem to underplay the preparation part because they don’t want to believe that they could achieve success by working hard and jumping on opportunities as they come by.
Are you interested in trying again when we’ve done a few things behind the scenes to beef it up?
yes I already paid for a year
Seriously I would I think its a great idea. 1 thing is the amazon hosted images really add some load time. It would be cool if you could cache those server side (much like gravatar)
Jeremy – We’ve seen the same things with MBL. Added about 3 seconds to pageload.
Ajax it. That works
What the christ does “ajax it” mean?
There is a saying I like don’t know who said it but it was something like.
“I’m just lucky and the harder I work the lucker I get”
hhhmmmmm………this would explain my “sites down” and “sites up” automated emails I get since adding it.
What are you using to test the load times?
David – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)
If you have a script or portion of the page that is terribly slow, since there’s no real way to tell browsers load this section after you’re done with everything, you want the loading to take place in the background after the page fully rendered.
Ajax lets you do that.
Disclaimer: With Ajax, MBL link tracking isn’t going to work unless you hack it.
Yes I know what Ajax is you jackass. The mybloglog widget already IS ajax. It just happens to suck.
hehehe. I should have hovered on the name “David” to see its you dillsmack
Yeah it’s all AWS’s fault. They have a great platform but it’s still in its infancy
Shoe — we’re working like you wouldn’t believe to get the servers upgraded. We’re looking at moving off of Amazon and we’re in the process of tripling our server capacity while streamlining the databases and code. We should have these changes done fairly quickly and you;ll hear all about it in the blogosphere so you’ll know when to add us again if you choose to wait.
Regarding the linkspamming though, I find it amusing that you choose to complain about that after posting exploits on your site.
So if an exploit isn’t published, it doesn’t exist?
Read up
Are you sure you’re at Yahoo, or did Microsoft really buy MBL?
I’ve been thinking of removing my mybloglog widget and after reading this it is now GONE! Thanks, Shoemoney
Good and fair minded comments, Jeremy. I think there’s potential in MBL. But I also think their interface with users/customer service absolutely sucks. I quit my original account, have recently tried one under a different name and one that doesn’t show all my blogs. I still think the number one architectural issue is the idea that anyone can “connect” with you, and spam you without asking permission.
Secondly I am a registered technogeek. I pride myself with being able to cure insomnia with a single blog post. I consider my command of technobabble and jargon second to none. So when I learn a useful, intelligent and extremely precise expression like ASS TON I know my day is made and I doff my cap to a far superior authority, sir.
Just what does MBL and “big daddy” Yahoo! do with all that information and who is the highest bidder?
Failure is not a bad thing. Learning from your mistakes is how we get better. Sure MBL has some tech issues, but they seem passionate about what they do even though they are owned by yahoo. I think they’ll end up fine.
I think they’ve upscaled their servers, it seems to load faster once again.