The MyBlogLog Blog

Unplanned Service Outage

1:03 pm

We are experiencing technical difficulties at this time and are working to get to the bottom of it. Symptoms include:

• Recent Reader is blank, no faces.
• New with Me, New with My Neighborhood, and New with My World lifestreams are down.
• Faces are not showing up on community member, contact listings or friender.

I'll refresh this post with updates.

2:55 pm

We're bringing things back up. Faces should be flowing back in and we're re-generating the lifestreams. We're sweeping up the shattered glass.

3:10 pm

Unfortunately, due to the outage, any traffic to your blog between 1pm and 2:45 or so was not recorded and cannot be recovered. Sorry everyone, we'll try to suck less next time.

It's tough being popular

Is your email inbox starting to look like you have been hearing way too much from MyBlogLog recently? It's ok, you can tell us to turn it down a notch.

It's awesome to have a lot of friends, and even more so being active in the hottest blog communities. But with messages coming in from other MyBlogLog members & the communities you follow, on top of your many friend requests and updates, we understand that sometimes all those alerts can be a bit much.

Head over to your MyBlogLog profile and check out your Account Settings. All the way on the bottom, we have given you the option only send you the scoop on the updates you really need. Go ahead and let us know us to only shoot you an email when you get a message from another member, receive a friend request, community messages or if we send you a system notification.

Drop us a line if you need any help!

XOXO,

Tilly

MyBlogLog adds FriendFeed, Magnolia and ThisNext to list of services

MyBlogLog is lifestreaming your lifestream.

We've got a ton of new information for you guys to share on your profiles! We just added ThisNext, Magnolia and FriendFeed to our list of services that we use to feed New with Me.

MyBlogLog now displays all of your FriendFeed comments and likes as well as updates from other services that you have added to FriendFeed. With comments, we've been looking for a way to highlight the great discussions going on at FriendFeed. Sharing your comments are a great way to point people to your activity over there. For the additional services, we do the de-duping for you so if you've got your flickr ID on both FriendFeed and MyBlogLog, not to worry, we'll filter out the duplicates from FriendFeed and keep it fresh. If it's a service we don't carry, such as a GTalk status messages, all the more grist for the mill.

Wanna share shopping recommendations? Load your ThisNext ID into your services and let people know what's on your list!

Last but not least, you can finally show off all those cool bookmarks you've been saving on Magnolia too!

2008 State of the Log

Man... What a long, strange year it has been.  Where to start...

Somehow, a few people still don't know that MyBlogLog was acquired by Yahoo! last year.  John Sampson, Steve Ho and I are still at MyBlogLog.  Eric Marcoullier and Scott Rafer have moved on.  Scott has a new startup called Lookery.  Eric, who has started blogging again, is working on a new *stealth startup*.

We have been joined by some amazingly talented people:

Ian Kennedy

Our new, super-connected product manager and all-around great guy

Chris Goffinet

Programming master extraordinaire

Manny Miller

Our UI/Javascript/Widget man

Raymund Ramos

We have an Ops guy now as you may have noticed from our faster service and lack of down-time.

Mani Kumar

Mani is working on a project we can't talk about yet from our Bangalore offices.

Saurabh Sahni

Saurabh is also working on a project we can't talk about yet from our Bangalore offices; but is currently visiting us in the States.

Robyn Tippins joined the team during the year as Community Manager where she did an amazing job.  She has since moved on to a new role inside Yahoo!

Luckily, the entire team was spared from the recent layoffs at Yahoo! and, amazingly, has continued to be more productive than ever during this period; as you may have noticed from recent blog posts.

So, how is the MyBlogLog service doing these days?  Not to shabby; if we do say so ourselves.  We are now averaging 22,000,000 widget impressions a day across 275,000 community sites.  This is up from 8,000,000 widget impressions a day across 47,000 communities in January 2007.  We have also gone from 97,000 reader to community connections to 1,653,000 connections.  Further, we now have over 100,000 3rd party service IDs for our members which will be integrated in the upcoming "New with Me" service.

So, we have made a lot of progress over the last year.  We have moved to Yahoo! infrastructure.  Added an additional data-center with service redundancy.  We have integrated with Yahoo! IDs to allow further distribution.  We have launched new widgets.  And we have continued to remain far and away the Web's largest distributed social network.

We have a number of great things on the horizon for the next 12 months.  The new API will be launching.  We will be integrating further with Yahoo!  And we have a bunch of projects in the works that we aren't quite ready to talk about yet.  Stay tuned... It should be fun.

Service Entry Made Easier

Adding your online services just got a little easier at MyBlogLog.  Pop on over to the Edit Online Services screen to see the new Ajaxy interface.

The services entered are currently listed on your MyBlogLog Profile Screen and are also displayed on our new "About Me" Widget.

We've also added six more services to the list; ActiveRain, FriendFeed, Multiply, Trulia, Tumblr and Zillow.  Three of the services are for our Real Estate professionals and enthusiasts.  If there are additional services you'd like added, let us know in the comments below.  Thanks to Drew, Kent and Louis for some of these recommendations!

What are you waiting for?  Get your service entry on!

Shiny New Objects

Over the next couple of weeks we're going to be shifting hardware around in preparation for a new set of gerbils to come online at a new colo facility to share the load. If you notice anything strange, wait a few and things should re-adjust themselves automatically.

Please don't adjust your set

Update: We're up and running again. Thanks for your patience everyone.

We had a little hiccup this morning throwing everyone's profile pages into blank, white, space. The Recent Readers badges are working fine and our hamsters are logging your stats just fine. It's just that you can't see them yet.

Stay tuned here for updates while we continue to work behind the curtains

Email Troubles, Right Here In River City

UPDATE:  This is fixed.  Woot for John!

When I realized today that our normal batch of several hundred a day had slowed down to zilch, it became apparent to even me that our emails were bouncing.  We are working feverishly to fix this, but until then we've beefed up the Help section and for more intensive support please post a message in our Users Helping Users Group. 

MyBlogLog Crawlers & Bots

We have noticed a dramatic increase in the number of bots crawling MyBlogLog.com, collecting data on our members and trying to position avatars at the top of Reader Rolls over the last several weeks.

In a few cases, the number of requests from these bots have had the equivalent of a Denial of Service (DoS) attack -- not only on MyBlogLog.com but also our member sites.  This cannot continue.  If you are crawling this site, please stop.

To address this problem in the short term, we are implementing new server monitoring and will ban anyone hitting the server more than 1000 pages an hour. We will also be updating our Terms of Service to make scraping/gaming of site content against the rules. Beyond that it's for the lawyers to resolve; and nobody wants that.

That said, we have a bunch of new ways to get MyBlogLog data coming in the next several weeks.  While we can't talk about them now, please stay tuned to this blog.

Thanks,
Todd

MyBlogLog Service Issue

Ten minutes ago MyBlogLog experienced a spike in our primary user servers that created a replication issue to the slave databases.  The spike has been fixed and the slaves are catching up.  We expect the service to be back to 100% in the next 5 minutes.

Todd

UPDATE: Final slave servers are nearly caught-up.  We will be pulling the MyBlogLog.com website out of maintenance mode (which we turned on to relieve stress on the database boxes) in the next 10 minutes.