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I was surfing around the main community page of MyBlogLog where they have a tag cloud of all the top 50 largest communities. I was clicking around on a bunch of them and one of them that I landed on was the community for Yahoo! Messenger. I was checking out their members and I noticed something that I had never seen before. There was an incredible amount of members of this community which did not have a personalized picture. If you choose not add a personalized picture to your profile, MyBlogLog shows a default black silhouette image like so :
Now I have spent a good deal of time on MyBlogLog and a vast majority of the people that I had seen have added some sort of personalized picture. I decided to dig a little deeper and lose some valuable sleep. I proceeded to go through each and every member of the Yahoo! Messenger community on MyBlogLog and out of 1247 members of this community, 574 of them do not have personalized pictures. Almost half…
Let’s look at some comparisons. My community is no where close to that size, but out of 102 members, there is just one without a personalized picture, but don’t take my word for it, let’s take a look at some of the other top communities which I went through as well:
- Problogger has 1798 members and only 121 members do not have personalized pictures.
- LifeHacker has 1823 members and only 193 members do not have personalized pictures.
- Techcrunch has 573 members and only 72 members do not have personalized pictures.
Compared with some of the other largest communities, Yahoo! Messenger community seems to have a much greater number of default pictures. Even though the numbers seem out of wack, I wanted to get some more information.
I went into the Yahoo! Messenger community home page and clicked on the ‘view all members’ link on the bottom of the page. This brings you to a page where MyBlogLog shows a list of 35 members each and then you have to click on the ‘next’ link to go to the next page and view another group of 35 members. I decided at random to click on 3 profiles of members who did not have a personalized picture on each page. Since they show 35 profiles per page and Yahoo! Messenger has 1247 members, that makes 36 pages and a total of 108 profiles checked.
Out of those 108 profiles, 105 of them had only joined one and only one community, Yahoo! Messenger. Most of them had only 1 friend which is Eric who you automatically get when you join. And most importantly, all 108, that’s right 100%, that I clicked randomly out of the 574 that do not have personalized pictures did not register a blog of their own. These profiles are completely blank other than when they joined, their 1 friend Eric and of course being a member of Yahoo! Messenger. See an example below:
I am not a big conspiracy buff, but does this seem fishy to you? Let’s recap shall we:
- Yahoo! who has recently purchased MyBlogLog and has a community promoting their product Yahoo! Messenger.
- They have an enormous amount of people who joined their community, but never bothered to add a personalized picture.
- These “members” have never gotten a single contact.
- They have never registered a blog of their own.
- They have never received one message from another member.
- But just be chance (?), they each took the time to join one and only one community, the Yahoo! Messenger community.
Could Yahoo! be spamming MyBlogLog with fake members just to have a larger community and get better visibility? And does Eric and the rest of the MyBlogLog’s original team know or have anything to do with this?
You tell me should I head back to my bunker and start watching reruns of the X-Files or am I onto something here?
Popularity: 2% [?]
Technorati Tags: MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo!, spamming
My immediate thoughts are they might be using it in some way as a test account, though I just created one and it didn’t contain any autojoined community - I would actually add autojoin on some yahoo blogs if I was them anyway.
It could have been someone from outside the organisation fooling with an adder script.
The funny thing is some of them have joined each other as well.
Andy, I saw that as well. What bothered me was doesn’t this question the validity and honesty of MyBlogLog?
That’s interesting. I wonder if it was some kind of default dump that linked up existing Yahoo! Messenger folks with the Y!M community.
Eric and Scott do a good job of responding to these things (at least from what I’ve seen elsewhere). I’ll be interested to hear what they say.
Tony,
I have sent a private message to Eric regarding this, b ut have not heard back, will update the post when I do. Thanks.
Cord, were all the profiles created on or about the same day? Or is there any pattern related to when they actually “joined?”
Jeremy,
There were a great deal all created within several weeks of each other, but no perfect pattern like they were all created on the same day. But if this was done internally within MyBlogLog, they could easily change the dates. But to answer your question, not that I saw. But also I was counting all these till about 3 am this morning so right around that time I think I was seeing care bears so you never know.
I love how my picture does not show up above in my trackback - hmmmm - am I part of the conspiracy?
Matt,
Thanks for the post on your blog. I agree with you that from any standpoint you look at it, this is not a huge deal. There’s nothing going to happen one way or the other whether this is true or not. But my issue is the trust factor. MyBlogLog is collecting a great deal of data on content, user information and interests. I believe that as a community, we are going to play a big role in determining whether this community is a success or not. I cannot put time and effort into something that I do not trust.
It’s time that companies are held to the same exact standards we as employees and people hold ourselves everyday.
True Cord. Trust is a huge when determining success.
If you step back and look at it - what a great direct marketing scam - the Trojan horse that watches your interests and then spams the hell out of them. I have to believe that Yahoo! is smart than that. I hope
Matt,
I would agree with you, but to be honest, I would of thought Sony and Walmart would of been smarter and not lied to their customers by putting out fake blogs. I would of thought AOL would of been smarter and not released confidential customer information. There have been numerous examples of how large companies have made very poor decisions when it comes to their online strategy.
I am not accusing Yahoo! or MyBlogLog.. I noticed something that just did not make sense and I am raising it as a possible issue.
It is a constant disergard to the consumer.
Matt - This is what I believe is so important. In the past, companies could disregard and disrespect customers and get away with it. With blogging and the kind fo attention and support you can generate very quickly, we for the first time can hold them accountable for their actions.
Great find Cord. That’s all I got.
That’s a seriously great find. I would think that it’s fairly common belief (or fact) that being able to display a high number of members in an online community would increase people’s likelihood of signing up (popularity bias). It’s also something great to write press releases about and use as a marketing tool. I’ve read some interesting data on MySpace where even though they flaunt the 100 million registered users count, only about 30% are actually active accounts. Maybe a portion of these users tried it out for a day and went, nah I don’t have time to belong to another community, but what you found is way too high a number for that to account for everything. I’ve purposely avoided that in trying to set up our community. Nice attempt at bringing some legitimacy to marketing. I’m interested to hear Eric’s response.
Hi Cord
I agree that’s certainly unusual. A couple of thoughts though, if the messenger blog added a widget, visitors might have clicked on it to see what it was all about, signed up & then thought no more about it. The messenger community might not, per se, be the “blogging type”, and without a blog the value of MBL is diminished.
Additionally, as per the MBL blog, don’t forget that messages from “non contacts” are not displayed by default.
Very interesting observation & it would have taken you ages to get those numbers - were you seeing avatars in your sleep?!
Hey Cord,
Sorry it took me so long to wade over here. I’ve been fighting a projectile vomiting server scenario. Server A vomits and hits Server B that involuntarily projectile vomits hitting me which causes me to vomit and as I am in as console, takes down Server A that I just got back up… round robin…
But back to the point at hand.
Wow. I’m of two minds.
First, I’m interested in the Yahoo connection as I was unaware MyBlogLog had been purchased. I know, I live under a rock. But with a LOT of servers, mind you.
Secondly, the first time I joined MyBlogLog I was really confused as to what it was all about. I didn’t find it overly apparent as to how to use the system or what it’s advantages were. And I was “spammed” within 3 days by dudes from some MLM financial site joining me as “members of my community” so I sort of wrote it off. In fact, I forgot all about it. But a post by Kate and then You caused me to go back.
So I’m curious as to how many of these people had any idea of what to do. It could be they were like me and just poked their head in.
As Meg points out, perhaps Yahoo was running a crazy promotion of some kind? I believe Yahoo had to be doing something or else that many new users wouldn’t have created an account so close together.
I’m definitely interested in what Eric says…
I’m a little surprised Eric hasn’t jumped in to comment yet. I imagine Andy Beal’s call for a boycott over the ShoeMoney banning is drawing all of the attention at MBL tody, especially now that TechCrunch picked up the story.
It’s amazing how bad things have gone since Yahoo acquired MBL. I’ve removed the MBL widget from my blog, at least until they clear up these unanswered questions and address the banning of users (it’s hard to violate their terms of service when they don’t have one).
Adam - That’s all you got.. You usually can’t stop, now you got nothing to stay? Maybe you need to get out of the house.
Clay - Great points…
Meg - You are absolutely right, it might be something like that. As I have said all along, I noticed something out of wack and I wanted to raise the issue and see if there was an explanation.
Sean - I am sorry to hear about the projectile vomiting servers. Let me tell you what works for me when this happens. I pour Jack Daniels all over the servers. They usually stop giving me trouble after that.
Kevin - I sent Eric an email via MBL this morning to ask for his thoughts. He has not responded to me. You’re right he has a bunch of fires that he has been putting out lately and maybe I do not measure up on the pecking order yet. I will let everyone know if I get a response.
Thanks for everyone’s comments!
I saw a similar post about this some time ago, but they hadn’t pinpointed Yahoo, just noticed that there were lots of profiles that had not info in them. It does seem a bit odd to say the least, but it makes you wonder why Yahoo would need to resort to these tactics. Its not like they’re a young startup that only a select few know about.
On another note, Shoemoney posted something else today about MyBlogLog, a different subject, but still very underhanded.
http://www.shoemoney.com
My servers are now sizzling and making funny noises… but I feel better… Of course… I had to test the Jack Daniels before pouring…
Damn what a waste of JD - the better option is to drink all the JD, and then when it has been fully processed by your body, use the “residue” on the servers.
Hi guys, sorry I’m late but we don’t think this is spam. As far as we can tell looking at the email addresses for verification, etc., the huge majority of the “default image” profiles are real people. There are two issues that lead to this kind of thing: 1. People who are just putting a toe in the water on MBL tend to upload a photo later if/when they decide to be serious about it, and 2. the Yahoo blogs reach a whole new demographic of people who are probably not as hardcore as you all. I bet fewer of them will upload a picture over time.
If there’s underlying data to suggest I’m wrong, please let me know (a pattern in the user names or whatever).
Great observation Cord……!!!!
Cord,
You got any reply from Eric about this?
Nirmal,
Scott another founder replied above.