From Friends to Favourites

So launch day has come and gone without too much incident. Even though our database server is still indexing the several thousand blogs of our users (it always takes ages, about a day and a half, to do it from scratch, then much less time to “top it up” thereafter), and so the posts in people’s Rivers are somewhat old at the moment (UPDATE: post indexing is now completing every hour or so and posts in users’ Rivers are fresh, fresh, fresh! : ), we have already had a lot of warm words from users so far. Thanks!

However, we have also had a small handful of users bemoaning features lost (or seemingly lost) in the upgrade. This is usually couched in the form “Blog Friends was my favourite facebook app and now it’s all different!” (We are of course most honoured that so many people seem to have liked the old app so much.)

Change is sometimes hard, but change all things must if they are to they are to continue to flourish.

That is not to say we will not take all users’ feedback with great seriousness, and do our utmost to make every single user happy. We absolutely will (and we are already considering ways to give users back control over quotas for friends’ and others’ posts in their profile box).

But we are determined to make Blog Friends accessible and useful, not just to people who themselves know bloggers, but to anyone who would like to read great blog posts. And for that to be the case, we realised that we had to go beyond the social mutuality of the “friend” metaphor of the old Blog Friends (ironically, given our name) to a “favourite” or “fan” metaphor where anyone can express their particular level of interest in any given blogger—whether they are “friends” with that blogger or not.

This “author preference” mechanism should hopefully prove to be a very useful feature for highly networked users also, as it enables a much more fluid process of discovering great new bloggers: we include in your River a small number of posts from “Favourites of your Favourites” (equivalent to the old “friends of friends”), and also posts from bloggers beyond even that second degree of remove, who blog about topics you’re interested in.

In using Blog Friends v1 extensively during the Private Test period, I personally discovered many, many new favourite bloggers—I had accrued a total of over 120 by the end of the test period!

Whether you want as many great favourite authors as you can find, or a handful of superb ones, the key point to remember is that you remain in control of your Blog Friends experience with v1. In fact, you have much more and much easier control in the new version, as you can feed your preferences on authors (and topics and posts) back to us as you read!

In a nutshell, while Blog Friends v1 is designed to be a whole lot more accessible to anyone interested in reading blogs, we have also worked very hard to make it a very powerful blog reading and discovery tool for the hardest-core of our users.

Please do keep telling us what you like and what you don’t, and we will never cease from striving to meet your hopes and expectations.