There was little surprise when I got the email from Yahoo! informing me that they will be closing MyBlogLog in a few months.
I have been a Yahoo! fan for years, primarily because when I first started to learn and use Internet, Yahoo! was the only (the most efficient one at least) major search engine provider (Google did not came to business until many years after that). My first website was hosted on Geocities (and I actually typed in the HTML code line by line!), first email address was @yahoo.com and first paid online album was Flicker, which is now part of Yahoo! as well.
Oh, those old days…
I am not sure how Yahoo! manage to get itself into such a deplorable state, to the extend that it even has to beg Microsoft for a search engine partnership. I guess the primary reason was it failed to improve their own technology – the Yahoo! search engine was not as great as Google’s, Yahoo! mail is not as useful as GMail (and they actually started charging money for POP and SMTP services, which was a big mistake considering how many people are using POP and SMTP to send/receive emails on their PCs and mobile devices.
As a technology company, nothing is worse than living in the glorious past, which is a mistake that Google is trying really hard to avoid these days by constantly pushing out new product lines.
RIP MyBlogLog, and all the best, Yahoo!