Much has been written about the “Shoemoney Affair,” in which the blogger known as Shoemoney wrote about a MyBlogLog hack that allowed unscrupulous types to spoof their identities, and was subsequently banned from the service, despite the fact that — as Tony Hung pointed out at Deep Jive Interests — MyBlogLog didn’t have a terms of service agreement that said anything about banning people (it has since developed one). The banning also happened despite the fact that, as Eric Marcoullier of MBL admits here, someone else had posted something about the same exploit over a month earlier (although it was on a French blog, and therefore might have been missed).
This all comes in the wake of several other MyBlogLog stumbles involving spam, which I wrote about recently. And while lots of people seem to enjoy taking shots at MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer and Eric Marcoullier and others, as though they were some giant evil corporation, I for one have been impressed with how quickly and honestly the team at MBL have responded to their various missteps and the resulting onslaught of criticism. In his latest post here, Eric says:
“A lot of people I respect immensely have written in to tell me that I screwed up, and after a point, it becomes impossible to avoid the truth. We banned Shoemoney originally to keep him from updating his list of User IDs on Wednesday night, which I think was the right thing to do. But after fixing the exploit, I should have unbanned him and thanked him for finding it. But I didn’t. I screwed up.”
Although there is still debate about whether Shoemoney should have been banned in the first place (like Steve Poland over at TechCrunch, I would argue he was just showing off, not being malicious, although Andy Beard doesn’t agree), Eric’s post is the kind of thing I like to see. With a small startup — albeit one that is now part of the giant Yahoo empire — it’s inevitable that mistakes are going to happen, as Caterina Fake points out in her post on the whole affair.
We can’t applaud startups for their gung-ho attitude and then slam then when they screw up. I think Eric and the rest of the team at MBL deserve a lot of credit for admitting their mistakes openly and clearly. Let’s move on.