Post Analysis: The MyBlogLog Buyout

Yahoo! is notorious for its buyout binges. It swept Flickr and Delicious up way back when. And there are so many odds and ends in its cache now that one wonders what direction the company truly wishes to head? To be perfectly honest, it seems like erratic, spur-of-the-moment behaviour to me, desperately trying to find some way to gain ground on Google ??? MSN isn???t really a formidable opponent to either Yahoo! or Google now, are they?

I remember speaking to relative about the triumph Yahoo! would eventually make over then-young-and-pretty Google. (This was a time before Google???s online office-suite had begun to take shape.) I mentioned that Yahoo! was more solidly built (all conversations are laced with some degree of ignorance) than the mediagenic ???wonderboy??? over in Mountain View. I figured it had its hand in so many places, Google would never outpace the biggest player in the industry. Evidently, I was wrong. But Yahoo!???s still got more traffic coming in. That???s gotta count for something, right? I???m not so sure about that anymore.

Last November, carrying on with tradition, Yahoo! acquired MyBlogLog, as well as Bix, a service that apparently is a YouTube-like karaoke performance database. No, I will not croon on about Bix; I???m a firm believer in keeping amateur attempts at replicating vocal tracks as private as possible. Feel free to sing, sing, sing while shampooing or getting sloshed and belting ???Free Bird??? on that dreaded 30th birthday, but please keep it to yourself.

I will, however, mention a bit on the MyBlogLog buyout, and not strictly because Profy utilizes the service. It???s growing increasingly popular, and when your startup gets a crisp $10 million check in the mail, you don???t return it. You take it, you smile, throw your fist into the air, pay off your debts, and treat yourself to a vacation and an attractive Italian and/or German sports coupe as congratulations on a job well sold.

Actually, I very much doubt any of the folks behind MyBlogLog had to move out and make way for a Yahoo!-borne posse. But regardless of the current status of the company???s teammates, one needs to look at the bigger picture more and more, particularly when only days prior we bid adieu to a record year of M&As (mergers & acquisitions). It???s doubtful that 2007 will trump ???06 in that area, but whether the industry???s veterans keep apace with buyouts and the like is not the point. It???s whether those buyouts do anyone good.

Okay, sure, $10 million to Yahoo! isn???t so much as a pebble removed from the bucket. But we do know what happened to Flickr. It got Yahoo!-fied. Not that that???s a bad thing, per se, but it just gave the impression that things were going to change, and it slowly lost its indie cred. I don???t know how you continue to have indie cred when you???ve got millions and millions of users trolling your servers, but Flickr apparently retained that one-of-a-kind feel. Now it???s almost a bit??? sterile. Yikes. And I like Flickr. Hey, at least it still looks a hell of a lot better than Photobucket.

MyBlogLog is still growing, and it will continue to do so, but whether Yahoo! decides to leave it be and let it do its own thing, or eventually play the firm-handed parent and make it into their own likeness and image, is what I believe the choice that will make or break MyBlogLog. Yahoo! would only be down 10 million big ones if MyBlogLog were meet its doom, but the blame would quickly find its way up the Yahoo! ladder, regardless of whether it was party to its kin???s demise. I don???t see anything sinister or underhanded about the acquisition, but I only fear that Yahoo!???s reputation will slide further if it were to make more wrong choices following it’s shopping sprees, and leave all of MyBlogLog???s users frustrated and disconnected.