MyBlogLog LogoBack in July of 2006, I signed up for MyBlogLog to check out their unique click-tracking services they offer. To this day, I still use MyBlogLog for their click-tracking on this website. A few months later, they debuted a new service, giving all members their own page and allowing users to form contacts with other members. For reference, my page can be found here.

At first, this was a really great idea (a 10-12 million dollar idea to be exact) that was well executed by the MyBlogLog team, but since then a series of problems and security issues have caused me to reconsider using MyBlogLog. When someone adds me as a contact or friend, I use this opportunity to check out that persons list of websites and have actually found a lot of sites that I stay subscribed to this way. But, a good portion of my adds recently (80%+) are message spam with people asking me to visit their website. They clog up my e-mail inbox and require me to go to my page and delete them. When I look at other people’s contact lists, some have 1,000+ people as contacts, almost as if they try to get their site added to every MyBlogLog page. I don’t think this was exactly how it was intended to work by its creators. My hope is that Yahoo’s acquisition of MyBlogLog can help this service to make a lot of improvements, but Del.icio.us is virtually the same as when it was acquired, so I won’t hold my breath.

So, now I ask you, in its current condition, what is the value of MyBlogLog to bloggers? Are the positives worth the problems with having a MyBlogLog account? And is it worth having the MyBlogLog widget on your site? In my experience, it slows down your pages load time and there are often inappropriate pictures that show up, causing my to consider removing it.