At the end of February, MyBlogLog debuted their entry into the lifestreaming market, aggregating your services from around the Web, and should you choose, showing you those activities from your MyBlogLog contacts. While I wasn't blown away with their first attempt, the Yahoo! subsidiary has come back with a new MyBlogLog-only wrinkle, dividing the lifestreaming activity by Topics, aggregated around specific tags. Now, instead of seeing the lifestream from just your contacts, you can see who the top members are by topic, and see a specific topic stream as a whole.
Early pre-launch screenshots from the new MyBlogLog Topics showing streams for "Web 2.0" and "Apple", for example, show how blog posts or del.icio.us bookmarks tagged with those terms fill the topic feed, with mugshots of "top members" and top community thumbnails also tagged on the right side. You can even subscribe to the Topics feed by RSS if you want to take the stream with you. (See: MyBlogLog: Topics: Apple)Soon, MyBlogLog promises that over time, users can join topics just as they are able to join communities in MyBlogLog today. These new Topics tabs will eventually fall alongside the "New With Me" and "New With My Neighborhood" tabs there, called "New in My World".
While MyBlogLog hasn't been the loudest social network of late, they are growing. There are now nearly 300,000 MyBlogLog sites, and the service is serving up more than 20 million widget impressions per day, including a small fraction from louisgray.com. (See the right sidebar) The introduction of Topics is an interesting one, and we'll stay tuned to see if it can help the company's offering gain even more traction.