MyBlogLog

A lot of people I respect immensely have written in to tell me that I screwed up, and after a point, it becomes impossible to avoid the truth.  We banned Shoemoney originally to keep him from updating his list of User IDs on Wednesday night, which I think was the right thing to do.  But after fixing the exploit, I should have unbanned him and thanked him for finding it.  But I didn't.  I screwed up.

***Original post follows***

Since Yahoo acquired MyBlogLog, they've done a superb job of angering and alienating their early supporters. A month ago, Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny called Andy Beal a spammer on his personal blog (and later publicly apologized). Over the next few weeks, MyBlogLog saw a marked increase in real spammers exploiting weaknesses in MBL's system, including a recent rash of unwanted co-author requests. But things started to get really ugly in the past 2 days:

• Jeremy "Shoemoney" Schoemaker was banned for disclosing MyBlogLog user ids (which were already visible to anyone on MyBlogLog's own site)
• Andy Beal announced a boycott of MyBlogLog in response to Shoemoney's banning.
• Cord Silverstein of Marketing Hipster raised questions about possible spamming of MyBlogLog on Yahoo's part.
• Micheal "Graywolf" Gray joined Andy's boycott.

While it won't have nearly the impact of Andy or Micheal's actions, I'm joining them by removing the MyBlogLog widget from this site. Whether or not it returns is entirely up to MyBlogLog and Yahoo, and how they choose to deal with these issues.

I urge other users to do the same. We trust Yahoo/MBL with an enormous amount of data about our browsing patterns and those of our users, and I don't think it's too much to expect a little accountability in return. Let's send them a message.