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Yeah, okay, I’m still mad at Google for adding every single person I’ve ever emailed to my “friends” list. But lately worse things have been happening to me over at MyBlogLog (remember them?).
I know, I know, MBL has long since fallen out of favor with tech & SEM bloggers. I’d forgotten about them, too, other than the occasional “So and so has added you as a contact” e-mails.
Until the end of May, when I got one of these e-mails that stood out. It stood out because there were two emails in the conversation—the first, the usual “Check it! [user name] has made you a contact on MyBlogLog.” The second e-mail, sent one minute later, read “Check it! [user name] has returned the favor and added you to their contact list on MyBlogLog. Click below to visit their profile.”
I logged in to MyBlogLog (and was reminded that they finally integrated with Yahoo—yeah, it had been a while), and sure enough, this particular user was listed as one of my friends. I deleted the user as a friend and shot off a report to the support team.
Over the next twelve hours, I received three more “[user] has returned the favor and added you to their contact list on MyBlogLog” e-mails, which I added to the support ticket (and finally blocked the user). The user was not actually added to my friend list after any of the later e-mails.
After a few days, the final answer I received was that it “Sounds like MyBlogLog message servers might have had a hiccup. It should be all jet set now! Let us know if it happens again 
.” I was never exactly clear on how the message servers would have added this person to my friends list, but whatever.
Now, I know that’s not news. Everybody has glitches. But a week later, it did happen again. I filed another support ticket. Meanwhile, I deleted the person from my contacts and received five more “[user] has returned the favor and added you” confirmation e-mails.
Two days after filing the ticket, I received this reply from MBL:
We have forwarded the information you have supplied to us to our topnotch engineering department for further review and investigation. If it’s possible to fix this problem, rest assured they’ll do it, or at least find a clever work around. (They pride themselves as master troubleshooters.)
After this message, I stopped receiving the “user has returned the favor” e-mail.
For a while. In the last 24 hours, I’ve received two more of these exchanges from two more users. Apparently the engineering department never did figure out what was wrong.
There was a good reason why most tech and tech-savvy bloggers lost interest in the service so quickly: there just wasn’t enough value added. If MBL insists on making social matches for me, I’m going to have to leave the site, if only because I’m getting tired of the spam filling my inbox.
So you tell me: have some people just hacked MyBlogLog or is MyBlogLog having serious “server hiccups”?
