Pretty interesting to watch as Yahoo's new property MyBlogLog gets attacked by spammers, and one of the people who is simply pointing out the flaws gets banned.

Yahoo's reaction so far hasn't been warm and fuzzy. A distinctive sound of crickets chirping, emanating from the usual suspects. A bit of a mea culpa from the MyBlogLog (MBL) team, but mostly around the technical issues.

Shoemoney and Andy Beal first raised hackles by having a contest to see who could get the most MyBlogLog readers.

Recently Shoemoney posted on how you could spoof any MyBlogLog User, and "surf" with their avatar. This was just one of a long line of possible spammy exploits. The MBL team must have gotten fed up with Shoemoney, cause they banned him.

The upshot is that when Yahoo bought MBL, they massively increased its mind-share - in the minds of spammers - which follows one of my fundamental laws of the internet: Basically, anything successful will be spammed in proportion to its success.

The MBL architecture was not ready for the spamming, and they are now scrambling to revamp it. Meanwhile, many high-profile sites like TechCrunch seem to be pulling the widget.

I'm mildly surprised that Yahoo & specifically Jeremy Zawodny hasn't handled this better - he's been a strong MBL supporter (even exempting MBL from his anti-badge spiel), but he's gone rather quiet when Yahoo needs him most.

Labels: mybloglog, shoemoney, yahoo, zawodny

¶ 2/23/2007