Antbag.com

After posting yesterday about my thoughts on MyBlogLog and Social Networking Sites in general, it seems things may have made a turn for the better. Darren Rowse of Problogger.net, posted an article raising similar concerns to mine, and pointed out that MyBlogLog had actually just released an Anti-Spam Plan after all the email-spam that went out over the past weekend.

MyBlogLog’s Six Point Plan

1. Official Terms of Service (ToS) will be posted and people will be held accountable.
2. By default, you now see only message from your own contacts. You’ll be able to click a radio button to see messages from everyone else. Further, you’ll only receive an email alert when a contact leaves you a message. Lastly, public views of your profile will reflect your message view setting, so other people viewing your profile won’t see random requests to visit their community or site.
3. We will include the text of the comment and associated controls (delete,reply, etc) in the alert email. You won’t have to go to MyBlogLog to manage comments on your profile or community page any more.
4. We will limit users to only five requests for co-authors a day. If you want to request more co-authors, come back tomorrow.
5. We will limit users to join 15 communities and add 15 contacts during any day. The others will still be here tomorrow.
6. After the first five are complete, we will set up a comment approval system where community members can automatically post messages and everyone else’s comments gets queued for approved (a la Typepad comments).

At Least They’re Trying

It’s nice to see that MyBlogLog is at least trying to save their reputation and serve their users. I’m impressed that they’ve jumped on this problem as quickly as they have. I think these are all positive steps in the right direction and I think MyBlogLog has the potential to be something really useful.