Entries by Jof

On the whole, the community feedback for the new version of Blog Friends has been fantastic: we’re really flattered that so many of you are passionate enough about our app to contact us and tell us your views. However, whilst much of the feedback has been positive, there’s one area that’s been a real disaster: the profile page

Many of you have got in touch to say you’re unhappy that the profile page of Blog Friends is displaying “strangers” in the “River”. With hindsight, we really should have seen this coming and we agree that the profile box should be about you and your friends/favourites - i.e. not about people you don’t know.

So we’re going to fix this issue very shortly. Hurrah!

Our quick fix is to make it so you only see your friends posts (so long as they have written some!). For most of you this means no more strangers; new users without any Blog Friends will naturally still get mostly people they don’t know.

We’re also looking at improving the profile box in other ways. However, we’d like your thoughts about it before we work it into the app, so there will be a blog post about this shortly where you can post your feedback.

Thanks again to all those people who took the time to voice their thoughts. We’re sorry that some of the changes weren’t great for you, but with your help we can make Blog Friends the best app it can be.

One of our servers is going haywire - many of you will have seen the dreaded facebook kinks error when you go to use the app.

Really sorry for this - we’ll have it fixed shortly.

Edit: very shortly evidently.  Seems like the database server just hacked up a hairball or something.

In the UK, there’s no event quite like the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) which is why I was pleased to be there this year representing Blog Friends. As you might expect from a 3 day conference packed with the world’s top web entrepreneurs, technologists and investors there’s far too much to cover here, so instead I’ll point you to the excellent summary by John O’Shea.

So what can I add? Well, since my dinner with Doug Richards a couple of weeks back my favorite theme has been “entrepreneurs’ worst mistakes/best lessons”, so here’s a few great ones from the FOWA presenters:

• Scott Rafer (MyBlogLog, Lookery): blog search doesn’t work (financially).
• Dick Costolo (Feedburner): don’t hire too many people too early.
• Ryan Carson (Carsonified): know when you’re on to a good thing and go with it, even if it’s not what you expected.
• Matt Biddulph (Dopplr): let the people decide how they are going to use your app.

Of course, the best bit was spreading the word about Blog Friends which we did via the magic of our moo stickers. We managed to empty nearly two sticker books at the after-party, including several on Kevin Rose of Digg.com and Alex Albrecht of Diggnation!

Guerrilla marketing at its best! (PS - thanks to the Flexiscale guys for hosting me that evening).

Cheers to Sam for the generous supply of free beers and venue last night for the Blognation Party - well done for launching a China division. It was great to catch up with Huw, David and Sam from Blognation and to finally meet Ewan Spence.

Events like this just go to show how great it is to be in a web startup in London at the moment: at the same event I chatted a wealth of established entrepreneurs such Richard Moross (I felt slightly strange exchanging moo cards with him!), Douglas de Jaeger and Anthony Eckinazi as well as fresh startup like Meecard.com. Thanks as always to Walid and Sokratis of Trusted Places for their hospitality.