What’s the deal with MyBlogLog?

I have now used MyBlogLog long enough to give some impressions on it, and unfortunately I can’t say that I’m impressed. Infact the first thing that comes to mind “what’s the point?” The idea seems to be pretty simple and straight forward. In addition to tracking stats for your blog, it offers some basic networking features. This involves creating a “community” for your blog, that other members can join, as well as a basic list of friends, or contacts as they are called there.

Now I must admit that the tracking of various data for your blog, which I guess was the original idea behind MyBlogLog, can be pretty useful. The idea of publically displaying the latest blog readers also is a good one. Unfortunately when I tried it out, it was pretty hard to customize so I couldn’t make it fit in to the design of my blog, and it also seemed to slow down my blog.

But that’s where the list of positive things I have to say about MyBlogLog ends. The other on-site features unfortunately seem to be halted by the fact that they have been thrown on top of the site, in an attempt to expand it with some extra features. Messaging between members for instance is quirky at best, and quite unorganized and hard to keep track of.

The lack of intutivity in the setup isn’t the worst part of it however. No, that has to go to the members of the site, who in my oh-so-humble opinion have turned it into a haven for spam of all types. Within a few hours of joining the site, I had around five “admirers”. That is people who added me to their list of contacts.

Now I am all for networking and making new contacts and all that which has been standarized with “Web 2.0″. What I don’t like however is having a list of contacts who I’ve never even exchanged as much as a single word with, which pretty much seems to be the norm over at MyBlogLog. A MySpace-esque contest about making as many friends as possible as quick as can be, and you will seem important, or something like it at least. And of course, let’s not forget the possibility that your contacts might even check out your blog, and hopefully even join its MyBlogLog-community, which would be the ultimate utopia!

This seriously represents all of what is wrong with the web currently. All of these possibilites to make new acquaintances seems to have come a little prematurely, as people are overwhelmed with it and wants to have as many new friends as the possibly can. Nevermind the actual purpose of it, which should be communication, exchanging thoughts, ideas, favours and all that goes hand in hand with actual networking.

Of course all of this can’t be blamed on MyBlogLog, but rather accredited to the way users think about networking. Are we putting too much emphasis on these possibilites, making users overly excited about it to the point where they just abuse the system? As much as I hate to admit it, I don’t actually have the answers to all of these questions. I will definately be investigating it though through my own experiences with my own projects, and hopefully I’ll eventually have some useful information to share with the lot of you. Until that is a reality however, let’s just hope that the people over at MyBlogLog can take some measures to limit these flaws of the community, because if they do, it would definately have the potential to be quite a pleasant place to kill some time.