Yahoo! IDs – Another Milestone For MyBlogLog

After weeks of warnings, the Bay Bridge, that connects the East Bay (where I live) with San Francisco, was closed for four days this weekend.  They spent days cutting out an old section and seamlessly replacing that section with a more stable portion of bridge, durable enough to stand up to a San Francisco earthquake.  When Ian and I were talking today, we realized that the situation we were experiencing here in our office was similar.

Our engineers have spent the last few weeks hunched over their terminals with the sole goal of integrating Yahoo! IDs with our MyBlogLog logins.  With no service outages and no adverse effects to our customers in that time, they've built a new road for our logins, that we can just 'jump over to' in the next few days.  You can't imagine how proud we are of our spectacular geeks.  (sniff)

So, without further beating around the bush, I want to let you know that later this week we will be merging all MyBlogLog accounts with their owner’s Yahoo! accounts.  We are doing this to ease login issues here at MyBlogLog (almost 20 hours of my time each week) and because it will greatly increase the integration possibilities for MyBlogLog with other Yahoo! properties.

The only bugger is that you will have to re-upload your avatar image (groan).  We’re going to be using the Yahoo! image uploader so it’s imperative that we save a larger, higher resolution image from each of our members.  The benefits, even above having an easier image upload tool, are that your images will not only look better, but will load faster (Hooyah! even speedier Recent Reader widgets!).  And, since each of the new uploads will be eyed by a customer service agent, you will see fewer 'racy' images on avatars.  Could this get any better?  But wait, there's more...  ;)

Now you can choose to keep your current name, use your Yahoo! name or even change your screen name completely.  And, no longer can only one person be a name.  If you want to be Sam, regardless of whether or not there is already a Sam, you can still be Sam.  Nicknames can be changed at will, and nicknames, just like in real life, can be shared by many people.  No more 'Change Screen Name Verified nonsense...  Reinvent yourself as often as you like!

In all seriousness, the migration should be relatively painless, but we do expect some snags.  If you have any questions or if problems arise, we’ll be here to help via customer service.  If you can’t find the answer on the Help pages, please don’t hesitate to email customer service. 

Thanks for your patience while we are improving.  The end result will be a better MyBlogLog.

Comments

[surjit]

A great achievement. You are doing wonders. Good luck

[iRonnie]

wow! the ability to change my nickname is what I have been wishing for. thanks guys for coming up with this one.

when can we expect this implementation?

[Andy Beard]

What effect is this going to have on URLs and indexing?

My MBL profile has probably been linked to a fair amount, as has my blog profile, they are included in other social networks etc.

In the current system, if you change your profile name, your URLs also change.

Lots of other Yahoo properties have nofollow all over them, and whilst I look forward to some integration, hopefully we are going to get some of the "juice" back from all the links we give you guys ;)

[engtech]

I'd love it if you guys could add OPML downloads of

#1 - the communities we belong to

and

#2 - the blogs that belong to our communities

You already have all the info, it would be about a week's work.

In turn it would open up a whole world of what you can do with your MyBlogLog community.

[Ian Kennedy]

@Andy

With this change, your screen name will no longer be tied to your profile URL so don't worry about profile URLs changing.

We're not changing anything about how we link to sites on these pages so all that will remain the same.

[adam]

making people upload new avatars is really bad. i would be very surprised if even half my visitors bother uploading a new avatar.

watch your service fall out of use.

[Robyn Tippins]

@Engtech - I'm a huge OPML fan, and you can be sure that it's on our list to discuss. Thanks for the tip. Oh, and I'm a fan of your blog too ;)

@Adam - I agree that uploading again is annoying. I know that it will be a pain and I apologize from the whole team that this is necessary. In order to show your image all over yahoo, we have to upload something that is high res enough to be shown larger than a thumbnail, which is unfortunately, all we have on file for our members. We can't ask Yahoo to change the way their images are shown on Groups, Mail, Profiles, IM, etc, and they are all larger than the teeny tiny thumbnail that we have. Again, sorry about this, but at least the image uploader is way easier than what we had before and these new images will make our recent readers widget load much faster too.

So, one yucky thing that allows us to give at least three cool benefits is worth it, I suppose :)

[Ryan]

Any idea when you'll flip the switch?

[DD2]

super blog.
Good luck, I'll be cak again often

DD

[Zmoney]

MBL is the best out there and I'm loving the updates

[Alexander]

Good one! (especially as a Yahoo-er from way back!)

[Rose]

What if you don't have a yahoo account?

[HMTKSteve]

This is bad news. I was just getting ready to add a bunch of my blogs to the system but I despise the idea of forcing me into a yahoo login.

I have a ton of different logins because I DO NOT WANT THEM LINKED!!!

Nothing bugs me more than linking accounts. I have dropped out of feedburner because they are now owned by Google.

So, can I get my money back for my membership since you are destroying the value of it by doing this?

Let me repeat: I DO NOT WANT MY MYBLOGLOG ACCOUNT LINKED TO ANY OF MY YAHOO IDS!!!

[Sebastian]

Is one of the change's disadvantages the lost tracking ability on my blog? I noticed a total lack of tracking (visitor widget and stats) for a while now.

And by the way can you please generate the widget code with s (HTML entities) instead of ampersands? Thanks!

[Derami]

OK, every time I think 'MBL has thought of it all - their work is complete!' you guys (and gals!) come up with something I wouldn't have thought of but will greatly appreciate. MBL FTW! Thanks as always :)

@The Naysayers: it's a small price to pay for an overall better and smoother service. The MBL widgets already run way faster than, say, those of a competitor I won't name, but even faster? It's worth it everyone.

[pierre]

i hope we could link more than one only mybloglog account to one yahoo id ?

Does it mean that mybloglog could be integrate with other yahoo products ? (yahoo profiles, yahoo 360, flickr avatars...)

[Robyn Tippins]

@Rose: You'll be prompted to create one if you don't have one already.

@HMTKSteve: We won't have an option of not merging, so if you want to be refunded, just email me at robyn@mybloglog.com. We just can't carry the customer service load any longer and the login system before was taking up the large majority of our customer service issues. By the way, I just visited your blog. Enjoyed it.

@Sebastian: Yes, that's probably what has happened. I'm very sorry for the trouble you are having. Also, can you add that ampersand suggestion to our suggestion board? That would be a big help!

@Pierre: I wish that was possible, but there is no way we can have multiple MBL accounts on one Yahoo! ID. It's one-to-one, but yes, it will make integration with other Yahoo! properties a cake walk. :)

[Steaner]

I´m bummed. I can´t log-in to MBL with my old email/password. Do I really need a Yahoo ID to get to my profile. I don´t get it. Could someone please let me know what to do. It´s been some time now, that I can´t reach my MBL account. Thanks.