Entries by Luke

We’re very sorry to announce that Blog Friends is to close down.

When i-together raised some seed funding back in the summer of 2007, Benjie, Jof and I fully anticipated taking Blog Friends onto great things, and we worked as hard as we could to make that happen.

Although it appears simple on the surface, Blog Friends is actually an unusually complex and resource-intensive application to maintain and grow. It also is pretty original in the way it combines your extended, fuzzy social network and your interests as filters for your blog recommendation River.

Because Blog Friends was so original and quite ambitious, we had no way of projecting accurately just how many users we could welcome before our solution began to creak. We hoped for 100,000. It turned out that 20,000 was closer to the mark. And now that we have around 27,000 users signed up, Blog Friends has been brought pretty much to its knees (as you will have noticed from the increasing frequency of the error messages you may have been seeing).

At the same time, the way that Blog Friends is currently tied into the Facebook Platform means we have been at the mercy of Facebook’s frequent modifications of their Platform specifications, and that has also been another disabling factor for us.

What is needed is a complete rewrite of Blog Friends, one that makes it properly scaleable and independent of Facebook. As you can imagine, this is a huge undertaking and unfortunately we don’t have the resource or money to do this; we have never inflicted any advertising on you our users, so we haven’t made a penny in revenue from Blog Friends.

We’re shutting down, as of today.

Jof, Benjie and I would like to offer you our heartfelt thanks for all your support and encouragement, and our sincere apologies for the annoyance of all those error messages and now the complete cessation of the Blog Friends service.

We had an amazing time building Blog Friends with you, and we have learned so much—about technology and business, but mostly about ourselves, each other, and all you wonderful people.

Finally, some of you may know that we have been working since the New Year on a sister service to Blog Friends, Buzzspotr.com, which we hoped to launch quickly, create a “buzz”, raise funding, then get back to work on rebuilding Blog Friends from the ground up. However, we have recently had to refocus on our contracting work (see brainbakery.com and weaverluke.com for details) to support ourselves before being able to launch Buzzspotr.

We still hope that Blog Friends will rise from the ashes, and that Buzzspotr will see the light of day, before too very long. If you would like to keep tabs on our progress, you can do so at i-together.com, weaverluke.com and brainbakery.com blogs, and on twitter: benjiegillam, jofarnold and weaverluke.

Thanks again and we hope your Blog Friending was happy.

Luke, Jof and Benjie—the Blog Friends team

Thayer Driver took some great photos of our user experience test session the other night. Thanks, Thayer! My favourite is this one, with Benjie (blurry in foreground) and Walid intent on their screens, while Eugene sees the funny side:

Yesterday evening, in a cosy room at the top of the Coach and Horses, Greek Street (our warm thanks to landlord Alastair Choat for his hospitality), we carried out a user experience test on our forthcoming physical location based web service with the help of Flow Interactive’s Ofer Deshe.

(We’ve given the exclusive on the service to TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher, so we have to be a bit mysterious!).

Ofer began by talking about his work and its value. A clip of Michael Douglas getting out-of-hours breakfast by brandishing a machine gun underlined Ofer’s point that services need to meet real customers’ real and individual needs, or else!

It was fascinating for us to see how a professional user experience consultant like Ofer works, and we got to understand how we could improve various aspects of the service, particularly the clarity with which it communicates its purpose to the uninitiated. Hopefully the other web entrepreneurs who attended picked up useful pointers for testing their own services.

Our heartfelt thanks to Ofer for his skillful facilitation and sharp insights.

Loads of great feedback and ideas were forthcoming in the group discussion after the formal test. It was wonderful to see the blank faces of the audience (as the initial testers tripped over some clunky bugs and half-baked UI features) become lit up with smiles as we let them all get stuck into the service on their own laptops, as a group. Truly, the social aspect of social web services can go a long way to fill in the gaps - especially if the service is simple enough.

Watch this space as we prepare for our private alpha launch, real soon now.

January is wearing on and Blog Friends users may wonder when they can expect to see some of the new features we have promised in previous posts—such as blog badges, a “Blog Friends 100″ leaderboard of top posts, blog stats pages, user profile pages and so on.Well, two things have happened since the New Year that are shaping our plans.

Firstly, having observed our servers come under ever-increasing strain from our steadily growing userbase, we have realised that we need to completely rebuild Blog Friends from the ground up. This will ensure continued reliable service as we grow; it will also enable us to offer Blog Friends access to users and partner services beyond Facebook.

Secondly, ideas from Mike Butcher and Lloyd Davis have inspired us to build a new service that extends Blog Friends’ utility into the physical world. We believe this project represents such an exciting opportunity to improve our users’ lives that it’s worth prioritising over everything else on our to-do list. All we can divulge for now is that the service will involve Twitter and Google Maps, as well as a couple of other popular web services! We hope to have something ready for launch by early February.

Once we have completed this new mystery service, we will be turning our attention to re-architecting Blog Friends as a solid and scaleable platform for all the great features we have mooted in previous posts. At the same time, we will strive to add all possible short-term improvements (for example, factoring post ratings into all your River content) that we can without adding too much additional strain on our poor database server.

Meanwhile, we hope you continue to get plenty of value from the existing Blog Friends service, which appears to be ticking over just fine. Happy Blog Friending!

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And so it is in the blogosphere: the “A-listers” tend to link predominantly to one another, which not only keeps their readerships circulating mainly amongst themselves, but also drives up all of their search engine rankings and profiles within social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us, thereby sending them even more readers.

Meanwhile, millions of other bloggers are blogging their heart out to audiences of zero to a handful. Yet so many of these so-called “Long Tail” bloggers are writing amazing, enthralling stuff that is quite the equal of that produced by more famous bloggers and that many, many people would surely love to read. The problem is, they don’t have the right kind of connections with well-known bloggers, or a sufficiently high public profile, or enough knack for self-promotion to leverage the sheer quality of their blog to reach those potential readers.

Still everything to play for

But we’re just at the beginning of blogging as a mainstream phenomenon. At Blog Friends, we see no reason why the blogosphere has to continue to blindy mimic the iniquities of traditional “free market” socioeconomics (the rich getting richer and the poor poorer). By contrast, we are hoping and praying that the blogosphere will begin to become a fairer and more transparent place in 2008. A place where cronyism is peripheral in determining the profile of any given blog, and where quality will out.

How is that going to happen? We have no idea. Who would be bold and/or foolish enough to predict the evolution of such a fast-moving and dynamic system as the blogosphere? But we do have some ideas for some experiments to conduct, in our tiny Blog Friends corner of the web, in service of our vision:

Blog Friends—ideas to level the blogosphere playing field

• Blog Friends 100: a leaderboard of top recent blog posts by our blogger users, where quality is judged by the proportion of readers for each post who say they like it, rather than by sheer reader numbers or incoming link count.
• “Blog Friend me!” blog badges that encourage blog readers to favourite the blogger within Blog Friends, which will also put the blogger’s posts in front of that reader’s own fans. A social way to spread blog readership!
• “Reach” reward points for sending new users to Blog Friends and for skillful “curating” (recommending great authors and posts to others). These Reach points could then be “spent” on increasing the number of views your posts get in others’ profiles and Rivers.
• Better recommendations in users’ Rivers. By factoring in the number of positive ratings posts and/or authors receive, we can hope to reward quality bloggers with more readers. At the same time, we hope to improve our Reader users’ experience too.
• Statistics for bloggers, helping them to work out which posts and which kinds of posts are popular with their readership.
• Twitter / Tumblr integration, making it easy for you to share post recommendations with friends—and for others to share your posts with their friends.

These are just a selection of the ideas we’ve been pondering over our Christmas puddings. And we’re sure that many new, and maybe even some better ideas will occur to us or to you, our honoured users, as we plunge forwards with Blog Friends’ development in the New Year.

Getting the technology out of people’s way

But, Blog Friends aside, I want to close by coming back to the larger point of this post. The blogosphere has the potential to be a truly amazing medium for people to share wisdom with one another. For every great blogger, there are readers who would care passionately about what you write if they could find you. For every reader, there are so many great blogs that could satisfy your thirst for informative, entertaining and/or inspiring writing. If the technology can somehow become transparent and dynamic enough to simply get out of the way of those relationships forming, there will be no stopping the blogosphere’s triumphant onwards march!

Alongside providing more conspicuous permalinks to blog posts (now done in your app and in your NewsFeed), one of the other most popular feature suggestions in our recent survey was a “Blog Friend me!” blog button. This button would not only send the reader to Facebook to add the Blog Friends app, but also automatically add the blogger as one of the user’s Blog Friends Favourites.

Given the number of you who said “YES!” to this feature idea in the survey, we felt there was no time to lose. So we got thinking and came up with this set of design ideas:

We’re planning to implement the buttons and badges in the New Year as one of our first priorities—so any feedback and additional ideas would be very welcome.

You can now track your Blog Friends’ activity (and vice versa) from the comfort of your Facebook NewsFeed—as illustrated below:

If you like getting these NewsFeed items, simply click on the “thumb up” icons next to each one and Facebook will keep showing them to you. Also, by letting Facebook know that these items are helpful, you will ensure that more people get to see them, thereby helping us to spread the word about Blog Friends.

Thanks to everyone who completed our survey on new feature ideas (sent to all members of the Blog Friends Group—do join up if you’d like to get involved in shaping Blog Friends’ future). Your feedback has been encouraging and thought provoking—definitely most helpful in putting us on the right track. : )

Many of your favourite ideas are going to take us some time to deliver, but happily there was one—one of the most popular ones, too—which we have been able to add right away. You wanted more prominent links to your original blog posts, and we have now added them:

We hope that these links will encourage even more readers to click through to your blog(s), participate in your posts’ comments, read more of your posts and so on.

The other thing we have added to Blog Friends in this release is a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page and lots of links to it in your River and profile box. This should help users to get answers to problems and questions quickly, while also allowing us to get on with making Blog Friends better rather than writing answers to lots of similar questions on the Group page forum (although we love to talk to you all).

The last feature release we plan before Christmas is an update to the items we send to your Facebook NewsFeed—we are working to bring you more kinds of more useful information. Details on this blog within the next few days.

Bloggers, did you know that when you invite friends to add Blog Friends, they automatically become Fans of your blog(s)? This means they will not only see your posts by preference in their River, but they will also automatically showcase them on their profile box for all their friends to see.

Better still, people who are Fans of your Fans will also get your posts in their River, so you get exponentially more reads of your posts for each Blog Friend you add. In other words, your blog posts spread two degrees of remove across your social network!

An effective way to gain Fans on Blog Friends is to link to us from your blog, perhaps along with your own explanation of why your readers might enjoy Blog Friends.

Here’s the link you need:

http://apps.facebook.com/blogfriends

Oh and feel free to quote any of the copy or re-use any of the pictures on this blog for material for your post. : )

UPDATE: Thanks to Allan Cockerill for pointing out that your blog readers must also be your facebook friends to automatically become your Blog Friends Fans.

You spoke and we listened: we have completely revamped the Blog Friends facebook profile box along the lines of my post “Like a virtual iPod for blogs“.

The profile box is now focused on showcasing not only your own posts (if you blog) but also your favourite posts and favourite bloggers’ posts. The River, on the other hand, is where you now go to follow both your favourites and to find new great bloggers and posts.

Showcase and social discovery zone; horses for courses.

Enjoy!