Like a virtual iPod for blogs

…which is the simplest analogy for our newly-revised concept for the Blog Friends profile box (although I have to admit that, of the three of us in the Blog Friends team, I am the only fully-fledged Apple fan, so you probably won’t hear Linux-nuts Jof and Benjie using this metaphor ; ).

As Jof said in his previous post, while people seem generally to love the new Blog Friends v1 Beta, but some of you have also told us you miss being able to control, in detail, what goes in your profile box. And many of you have not, it seems, yet realised that the real action in Blog Friends is not in the profile box at all, but in the full-page social feed reader we call the “River”.

When we conceived Blog Friends v1, we planned to have the profile box and the River function as identically as possible (and it was quite an achievement on the part of Benjie and Jof to make that happen, incidentally). Our thinking was that you would want a consistent experience throughout as much of the application as possible.

However, in the light of the very helpful feedback you users have given us, we have realised that this was not the right approach: the River is, by its nature a fluid and serendipitous experience, which is great for finding interesting new bloggers and posts, but not really suited as a showcase and/or organiser for the blogs and stuff you like best. And it seems that you have enjoyed being able to use the old Blog Friends to showcase and organise posts from yourself and your friends as much as you liked being able to discover interesting new bloggers with it.

We clearly need a re-re-think for the v1 profile box!

So, in a revised concept we have cooked up, pictured below, the profile box becomes a bit like an “iPod” to the River’s “iTunes”: you store and play back your favourite stuff in your profile box (for yourself and your friends, in Blog Friends’ case), and find interesting new blogs in your River, which mixes together lots from your Favourites plus a little from other bloggers we think you might like.

There are three sections, all optional and with optional numbers of items, in the new profile box concept: “My posts” (posts from your own blog[s], if you do indeed blog), “My favourite posts” (posts you have marked as favourites with the “thumb up” button) and “Posts from my favourite bloggers”, which are the posts from your favourite bloggers that sufficiently match your interests and/or have a certain level of “favouriting” within your community.

For a more detailed picture, here’s a mockup of the new profile box concept:

Of course, over and above the intrinsic difference between “discovery” and “showcasing” use-cases making the River metaphor less-than-ideal for the profile box, we also have the challenge of improving our feedback options and recommendation algorithms so that all the stuff we bring you in your River is interesting—whether it is sourced from/via your Favourites, Favourites of Favourites or your Extended Network (the people we reckon you may have an affinity with even though they are not in your two-degrees-of-remove social network). We do have some devilish cunning ideas in this area too, but please bear with us—Benjie’s fingers will fall off if we make him code any faster!

Going back to the new profile box concept shown above, other points we have tried to address include:

• What if people want to read more about you or another blogger you showcase? They would now be able to check out the relevant person’s Blog Friends Profile page (of which more soon);
• As a blogger, you want to know how your posts are going down across Blog Friends: the new concept would show bloggers how they are doing with headline stats;
• Some people don’t like the profile box taking up too much space: optional photo display would enable a more streamlined look;
• Feedback and support options would be included in the profile box itself, making it easier to customise and problem-solve for the profile box;
• What is this “River” anyhow, and why bother favouriting posts? The new concept makes it much more obvious that the real action is in the full-page River, and that favouriting posts will add them to your profile box.

So, what do you think? Does this new profile box concept work for you? We’ll be starting to work on some of these new features this coming week, so do let us know your thoughts in the comments—each new feature is numbered in the mockup for easy reference.