Very good point. Maybe we can get an idea of who might still be at Yahoo amongst the inventors listed on the patent:

Saurabh Sahni – His LinkedIn page says he is currently a Tech Lead at Yahoo!

Ian Kennedy – His LinkedIn page tells us that he is now Head of Service Innovation at Nokia.

Pankaj Kothari – His LinkedIn profile lists a most recent position as Senior Engineering Manager at Yahoo!

Todd Sampson – LinkedIn tells us that he left Yahoo in March, 2009, and that he is working with a number of companies as an advisor or in other roles.

Emanuel Miller – According to LinkedIn became a Senior Performance Engineer at SunRun Inc. in August of 2008, since leaving the MyBlogLog team.

John Sampson – Former lead engineer at MyBlogLog; his LinkedIn shows him to be a co-founder of Zentact, and involved in a couple of other companies since his July 2008 departure from MyBlogLog.

Chris Goffinet is now (LinkedIn) a Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Digg.

Steve Ho (LinkedIn) left MyBlogLog and Yahoo in June, 2009, and is now a DBA/Developer at cloudspace.

Raymund Ramos (LinkedIn is still at Yahoo, though he is now working at a NGD/OfferApps Service Engineer.

Mani Kumar (LinkedIn) left Yahoo in January 2009, and is now a Senior Software Engineer at SlideShare

So, it appears that there are only three people left (listed on the patent application) who worked on MyBlogLog at Yahoo, and a couple of them looked like they were working on development of the project in Bangalore. I don’t believe that they were amongst the original founders of MyBlogLog. This post on the MyBlogLog blog tells us that a number of these people joined the team after the acquisition:

2008 State of the Log

Eric Marcoullier and Scott Rafer had already left at that point.

The idea of using lifestreaming information is interesting, and I suspect the notion might survive beyond MyBlogLog in one form or another.

Google does have their own approach to targeting ads, including the use of searching and browsing history, and in places like GMail. It’s possible that they may take steps like this one as well. Guess we wait and see.

Thank you very much for pointing that page out.

The timing of their publication matches up well with the filing of the patent application. It looks like they sent the patent filing to the USPTO a few months after publishing the post. Mani Kumar and Saurabh Sahni are listed as the creators of the plugin, and their names appear amongst the inventors listed on the patent application. The post also notes that a patent has been filed for the widget.

The wordpress page for the plugin is at:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mybloglog-justforyou/installation/

It looks like the plugin hasn’t been updated since 2008-8-19, and it is only compatible up to WordPress 2.6. If they really want people to use their plugins, they need to keep them up to date. Unfortunately, they haven’t.

The “Just for You” widget is included as a plugin choice in MyBlogLog, but they don’t show a screenshot, and the copy included with it isn’t the most compelling that I’ve seen.

I’d definitely consider using this if Yahoo decides to release it. I’ve seen a number of blogs that include “most popular posts” or “top blog posts” widgets in their sidebars. This would be another that bloggers could use in addition.

It could potentially make older blog posts more visible, and more likely to be visited, especially since those posts may be someway related to something they’ve blogged about recently, or shared a link about, or tweeted on. I think, in that way, it enhances discoverability, by making posts that someone might specifically be interested in much more accessible than having them dig through archives pages or site search results.

The profile created would likely use a tagging system, so if you’ve recently written or tweeted or created status updates about Firefox, bug fixes, productivity, or browsers, chances are that the widget would display recommended pages for you based upon matches with tags that match those topics. So, you might not see old posts on Lifehacker about an offline only desktop calendar or spell checker as recommendations, but you would still be able to search Lifehacker, or browse through their topics, or use their tagging system to uncover other things you might be interested in.

If your recent “lifestreaming” activities aren’t really a good match for what you might be looking for on a site that might use a widget like this, then those recommendations might not lead you to things that you are interested in, but the patent application does mention that they would likely only look at your recent activities to show recommended blog posts. So the next time you visit that site, the recommendations that you see might be a better match.