Blog Friends v1 Beta—an introduction

Your personalised news source

Finding great news and opinions is getting harder and harder these days.

On one hand, everyone is overloaded with information. You know there’s lots of great information “out there”—if only you could find it amongst an ocean of irrelevance.

On the other hand, even the best newspapers and magazines can get, well… a bit boring. Same old topics, same old authors, same old editorial slant, day after week after month.

Enter Blog Friends!

Blog Friends is your personalised news source. We bring you a River of news, drawn from thousands of blogs from around the world. You tell us what and who you like. Then as we learn about you, we give you plenty of what you know you like—plus a little of what we have a feeling you might like.

You won’t get overloaded, but you won’t get bored either!

Enjoy it

Using Blog Friends is really easy and fun: the quality of your River of news improves all the time as your friends and broader community rate stuff they find, while you simply read and enjoy! Positive ratings of each author and blog post boost their chances of appearing in your River, and we get these ratings not only from your feedback, but also from the feedback of your community.

Ratings also help you to find the very best stuff in your River. The more Blog Friends thinks you (will) like an author, the brighter blue their posts are marked:

Note to users of the old version of Blog Friends: the people who were called your “friends” and “friends of friends” in the old Blog Friends will be assigned automatically to “Read often” and “Read sometimes” status respectively in Blog Friends v1 Beta. Also, we will automatically transfer your interests and preferences to the new service. So don’t worry, you haven’t lost anything you had, just gained a whole lot of new options!

We also indicate how popular a post is within your community:

Finally, the more of your own interests match the topics of a post, the more likely it is to appear in your River:

Shape it

We make it really easy for you to express your own opinions on individual posts and to choose the topics you read about:

And it’s a breeze to choose how often you read each author, simply by adjusting a slider:

Then simply click the “refresh” button and watch Blog Friends bring you more of what you like and less of what you don’t. Even if you haven’t changed any settings, Blog Friends will still give you a fresh set of great recommendations!

You can also choose to show anything from three hours to five days-worth of posts per page—so whether you want to track, in minute detail, the latest hot news to explode across the blogosphere, or to catch up quickly on unmissable posts after a few days away, Blog Friends is there for you.

Share it

Most importantly of all, the more friends you invite, the better your Blog Friends experience becomes. As each of your friends starts discovering great blog posts and authors, you see the best of their recommendations in your River.

Having worked long and hard to make Blog Friends v1 as good as we can, Benjie, Jof and I feel that it is one of the best, most enjoyable and social ways to find and share great blog posts. We help you tap into the knowledge and wisdom of your community—without ever losing sight of you, the unique individual.

Ok, let’s go!

If you are already a Blog Friends user, we hope you are enjoying it, and would love to hear from you in our forum. If you are new to Blog Friends, just visit the link below to get started (you will need to sign in or sign up to facebook on your way to Blog Friends).

Happy Blog Friend-ing!

Take me to Blog Friends!