Yahoo! buys MyBlogLog

A number of us South African bloggers have started using MyBlogLog quite a bit lately. It seems like someone else signs up virtually every day. Well, Yahoo! has just bought MyBlogLog in a sale that was on and off for some time.

Om Malik has a great story about the sale and the company that is run by Scott Rafer, a good friend of his, which was developed without venture capital and which has apparently been in talks with Yahoo! since late last year. I love this introduction to Om’s post (reproduced with Om’s kind permission), it really gives an insight into the human side of the sale which we often miss when we get caught up on the parties and the cash passing hands:

A few minutes after we had ordered our dinner at Mehfil Restaurant in San Francisco’s SOMA district, Scott Rafer, chairman of Orlando, Florida-based MyBlogLog, checked his Blackberry Pearl, and broke into a smile.

An unusually intense man, it was an unusual sight to see him smile. He typed out his response, and asked his lady friend to press the little Pearl to send the email. It’s done,? he said, referring to the sale of MyBlogLog to Yahoo.

MyBlogLog was founded by Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson in 2005 who connected via LinkedIn (which many of us use as well) with the intention of building a traffic measurement tool. Rafer apparently came up with the idea to create a distributed social network and we soon found ourselves with MyBlogLog.

Of course TechCrunch also has a post about the deal. According to Michael Arrington, MyBlogLog will now be part of the Yahoo! Developer Network and the talk is that, as with Flickr, Yahoo! users will soon be able to log in to MyBlogLog with their Yahoo! IDs which will expand the user base quite a bit. With this acquisition, Yahoo! will now hold the keys to some pretty impressive social sites like del.icio.us, Flickr and now MyBlogLog. That doesn’t include its own offerings.

I have this notion that Yahoo! is buying up these smaller companies (this deal is rumoured to be in the region of $10 million) and, at the same time, building up quite a nice portfolio of Web businesses. I wonder what Google is going to do to catch up, assuming it has plans in the same space?

Anyway, all you MyBlogLog users, welcome to the broader Yahoo! family.

Tags: mybloglog, yahoo!, yahoo, purchased, om malik, gigaom, techcrunch, sale, scott rafer