MyBlogLog Manages to Make Its Interface More Difficult

Recently MyBlogLog, a popular blog community and blog sharing site, went through some changes. It was acquired by Yahoo a while back, a change that was met with aggravation by many users who didn't want to a) combine their Yahoo personal account with their MyBlogLog account or b) be forced to create a second Yahoo account to handle the issue of privacy. Now MyBlogLog has eroded user privacy and usability yet again with its “New With Me” feature.

This feature is not only unwanted and not needed in the face of all the social applications and aggregators already out there, it is impossible to avoid. It gives you your own “news” feed, gleaned from any sites, like Twitter, you may have added to MyBlogLog in the past, thinking they'd stay on your profile page only. It also gives you the news feed of everyone in all of your communities, which is horribly cluttered.

Frankly, I don't care what everyone in my communities are doing. Ever since MyBlogLog added the annoyance feature a while back of automatically adding you to communities you visit more than once, whether you want to belong or not, the communities feel more like marketing scams than places to meet like minded people who like your blogs. It is already impossible to get out of a community, even if the only reason you visited was for research, never to return. The news feeds are simply one more intrusion.

Up until the past few months I was a big believer in MyBlogLog. It started off as a fun way to see who was reading your blog, visit their blog, and maybe make a new blog friend or too, or possibly find a blog resource you wouldn't have discovered otherwise. Now it has turned into the Big Brother of the social networking scene, sticking its nose (and the nose of everyone who uses the service) where it doesn't belong.

Hoping for the best, I logged in to MyBlogLog (something I haven't done much since the shift to Yahoo). I was seeking a way to get out of the news feed nonsense. I don't want to spam my blog buddies with my pseudo news, and I don't want to get spammed with theirs. I have a plethora of less bulky applications and sites for that, from FriendFeed (which I actually like) to Plaxo, Onaswarm and many more.

I first went to the Services tab in MyAccount, thinking I'd start at the top and get rid of my Twitter feed and any other things I had that my friends wouldn't want to have to see every time they logged in. That's where things went horribly wrong. MyBlogLog seems to be having problems with opting out of its services, as it kept me locked in an endless loop instead of making the changes I requested. The more this happened, the angrier I got.

After literally two hours of messing with MyBlogLog, trying to opt out of the news feed and stop subscribing to various services, only to continually get stuck in the “This will delete your XX. Cancel/OK” window, I gave up. No matter how many times I clicked OK in how many different browsers (Camino, Safari, FireFox), it wouldn't delete anything intrusive or allow me to opt out of the feed.

I don't have time for social applications that aren't user friendly or that don't work. This means that I am seriously considering finally deleting my account on MyBlogLog completely and removing it from my sites - something that invasive isn't worth the effort to use it or the problems it can cause with site load times. Of course, this will probably require a series of emails to MyBlogLog to remove my sites from their community lists, because they don't make leaving easy, either.

UPDATE: After reading this today , 3/3/08, I am definitely removing myself from the MyBlogLog universe. Internet brain indeed. No wonder Microsoft wants to buy YAhoo so badly - they share a Big Brother mentality.