Blog Friends v1 Beta launch one week away

Since we opened the Blog Friends v1 Private Beta last week, we have been busy tweaking features and fixing any number of little bugs, with much help from our stalwart Beta testers (thanks guys!).

We now seem to have got the new service working pretty well in Firefox, and we are turning our attention to testing in other browsers.

Bug-squishing aside, the other thing we are determined to do is to serve anyone who wants to find great blog posts—be they a Robert Scoble with thousands of facebook friends and the ability to skim read an even greater number of blog posts every day, or someone like my mum, who isn’t into geeky stuff, gets her news from a newspaper, doesn’t read blogs yet and wants something that “just works” like her iPod.

This is a trickier challenge than you might imagine, but we’re getting more and more confident we can crack it. A key point seems to be maintaining a balance between giving users plenty of stuff they know they like (from their favourite bloggers and on their favourite topics) on one hand but also making it easy for them to check out stuff they might like on the other.

A mix of a traditional feedreader and social blog discovery engine, you might say, all blended into a single River of easy-to-use goodness. Except all that users need to know is that it’s a great way to discover and follow interesting blogs and blog posts.

Anyhow, you will notice that I have included a sneak peek of v1 in this post (although it looks like Mike Butcher at TechCrunch UK scooped me!) All you need to do to sign up for it is:

a) if you’re an existing Blog Friends user, sit tight. Your facebook profile box will update in about a week’s time, and you can click through from there to the main, full-page application;

b) if you’re not a Blog Friends user yet (and if not, why not?!), simply add the current version of the service and you will also find it updated early next week.

Blog Friends—it’s as easy as falling off a log, only more fun and informative.