UPDATE: After reporting this story on Friday, we were contacted by one of Yahoo's PR representatives over the weekend who informed us that Yahoo has not yet purchased MyBlogLog. Many tech news blogs jumped the gun on this one after it was reported on Valleywag, and then on TechCrunch, who apparently got the same note as us on Friday. The latest rumor is that Yahoo is currently in early acquisition talks with MyBlogLog.
Rumors pointing to an impending sale of the social network site MyBlogLog to one of the so-called "Big Three" have been floating around since last week's Web 2.0 Summit.
It turns out that the rumor was true – Valleywag broke the news earlier today that Yahoo has acquired the social network for bloggers for "around $10 million."
This is the third acquisition announcement to come out of for Yahoo today [Yahoo has not yet announced the acquisition],
after the company said they had purchased the contest site Bix and the
Swedish mobile communications company Kenet Networks. Read our coverage of these other acquisitions in our previous post.
MyBlogLog connects bloggers by encouraging them to build communities
around their favorite blogs. After users sign up and create a profile,
they can connect with other members who read the same blogs as them.
Members who are bloggers can also interact with their readers by
becoming friends in MyBlogLog social network, trading links or topics
with one another and keep track of which other blog sites their readers
are checking out.
Yahoo is clearly on a roll, moving quickly to dispel the criticisms that it can't move quickly enough to compete with Google and Fox Interactive Media in the acquisition game. However, MyBlogLog and Bix are both B-list prizes (no offense to those companies) compared to Facebook and YouTube, two sites that Yahoo tried to close deals on before failing.
I'm more excited about MyBlogLog than Bix, though it seems that Bix is the better candidate for tight integration into other areas of Yahoo.
Previously:
Yahoo Picks Bix
