MyBlogLog, fake social proof?
MyBlogLog (acquired for $10m about a year ago by Yahoo!) is a nice idea. You include a small line of code on your site & it displays who your readers are. I won’t go into the stats you can collect from from doing something like that, but needless to say you can get a lot of information. It’s valuable information as well.
To your website visitors it provides social proof; that they are in the right place, that your content is worth reading, that their friends read your site. For you it provides reputation by association. But, it’s a lie.
- Visiting a site doesn’t make me a reader
- I don’t consider myself to be associated to someone because I read their blog
- By visiting a site, I don’t endorse it, or it’s content.
It’s not social proof, but it’s cleverly disguised as social proof. What’s more, I think people trust it as social proof.
p.s. screenshot of MyBlogLog’s widget nicked from Will McInnes’s blog. Few familiar faces in there; Nic Brisbourne, Ivan Pope to name a few. See, social proof?
p.p.s. with people moving from visiting sites to feed readers how valuable is it really? Google saw that, and with Google Reader & Feedburner need I say more…
p.p.p.s. without manually removing cookies from your browser there is no way to stop it tracking you (logging out won’t work)
Tags: Google, MyBlogLog, Social Proof, Social web, Thoughts, Yahoo
February 7th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Hi Dave, Interesting. I was on the MBL team when Y! bought it, and I’ve never heard the “fake social proof” slant before. I think it’s a case of MBL growing beyond people’s expectations. When we shipped the widget, we didn’t expect there to be hundreds of thousands of them 12 months later. It changes the dynamic in a way we hadn’t understood. At first people joined to get their faces on a specific few blogs. That we each now see them dozens of times a day shocks and flatters the old crew.
The new API that MBL is shipping will help. It allows one to differentiate between dedicated readers, casual passers-by, etc. Loic LeMeur had asked for just that from the start, because his huge readership made him aware of these issues sooner than the rest of us.
February 7th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Hi Scott,
Thanks for commenting, everything you mention is interesting to know.
I’ll keep my eye out for the new API. Do you know how dedicated reader/casual passer-by is being calculated, or is that ‘top secret’?
February 16th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Hi,
I doubt it’s secret, but I don’t work there any more so I haven’t dug in and figured it out.