I just came across this post at the Social Media Explorer where Jason Falls puts his spin on the new Lifestreaming functionality coming to MyBlogLog very soon. I wrote about this as well recently. It appears that Jason struck a nerve when he stated “Is Yahoo just ripping off established aggregators like Profilactic?”. It just so happened that Eric Marcoullier (one of the Co-Founders of MyBlogLog who is no longer there) made his way to the site and left 2 comments providing us with some history behind the “New With Me” functionality which is soon to be released.
Quote from Eric:
We hade the first version of New With Me circulating in private beta in late April of 2007. We were not allowed to launch because it was apparently in conflict with another project in development elsewhere in the organization that was due to launch a year later. One of many reasons I left.
This is interesting on two levels. The first being that Eric saw Lifestreaming as being an innovative new concept and could have positioned MyBlogLog as a frontrunner in the service game. Secondly, what could have been the Yahoo project in development that was holding this back, and is it still coming or has it been scrapped? Very interesting things to ponder.
I do feel for Eric as the ordeal must have made matters incredibly frustrating for him after Yahoo’s purchase, and you can feel it from his comments. It’s situations like this that can really take the wind out of your sails. I wonder if matters were made worse if after leaving he had to sign a non-compete clause not allowing him to work on a Lifestreaming venture of his own. That’s assuming he even wanted to at that point. I can only speculate.
Shortly after Eric’s comment we see another one posted by Todd Sampson who was also a Co-Founder of MyBlogLog and still with the company.
Quote from Todd:
In the end, every site is going to have a user’s life-stream available as a tool to help make the user’s experience better. What a site ultimately does with the life-stream is what will matter.
That is oh so true and he hit the nail with that one. We have seen so many services that are now able to aggregate the data, slice it, dice it and so forth. The next step in the evolution of Lifestreaming will be to see some killer algorithms written do something meaningful with all this data that’s being provided.
Todd also has a post titled “Distributed Social Networks have Tipped“. I agree in that the launch of all the recent efforts to free our data including those by OpenSocial, Data Portability, DiSo, and Google’s Social Graph, we’re hopefully gonna see more innovation soon.
I’m just glad that MyBlogLog is finally moving forward with something they’ve had baking for over a year. Funny thing is it’s usually the other way around with ambitious development efforts taking too long to market and angering the biz folk. Here you had some innovative code being forced to stay on the development server and not getting to see the light of day for almost a year. An ugly form of irony if you’re in the dotcom field.
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MyBlogLog “New With Me” Incubating for a Year Says Former Co-Founder
Quote from Eric:
This is interesting on two levels. The first being that Eric saw Lifestreaming as being an innovative new concept and could have positioned MyBlogLog as a frontrunner in the service game. Secondly, what could have been the Yahoo project in development that was holding this back, and is it still coming or has it been scrapped? Very interesting things to ponder.
I do feel for Eric as the ordeal must have made matters incredibly frustrating for him after Yahoo’s purchase, and you can feel it from his comments. It’s situations like this that can really take the wind out of your sails. I wonder if matters were made worse if after leaving he had to sign a non-compete clause not allowing him to work on a Lifestreaming venture of his own. That’s assuming he even wanted to at that point. I can only speculate.
Shortly after Eric’s comment we see another one posted by Todd Sampson who was also a Co-Founder of MyBlogLog and still with the company.
Quote from Todd:
That is oh so true and he hit the nail with that one. We have seen so many services that are now able to aggregate the data, slice it, dice it and so forth. The next step in the evolution of Lifestreaming will be to see some killer algorithms written do something meaningful with all this data that’s being provided.
Todd also has a post titled “Distributed Social Networks have Tipped“. I agree in that the launch of all the recent efforts to free our data including those by OpenSocial, Data Portability, DiSo, and Google’s Social Graph, we’re hopefully gonna see more innovation soon.
I’m just glad that MyBlogLog is finally moving forward with something they’ve had baking for over a year. Funny thing is it’s usually the other way around with ambitious development efforts taking too long to market and angering the biz folk. Here you had some innovative code being forced to stay on the development server and not getting to see the light of day for almost a year. An ugly form of irony if you’re in the dotcom field.
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About Mark Krynsky
I created Lifestream Blog and hope you enjoy the site. I'm always looking for contributors so contact me if you're interested. You can follow the rest of what I like to write about at my personal site or follow me on Twitter or Facebook