Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized'

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.

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.

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!

We have been giving some thought to what kind of Blog Friends information you might find useful to have show up in your facebook NewsFeed.

Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

What do you think? It’s really important we get these messages right, as not only is it a great opportunity to add value to your Blog Friends experience and to spread the word to others, but getting it wrong will annoy people and the messages will end up getting marked as “spam”! :S

Incidentally, Benjie won’t be implementing the new NewsFeed items for a couple of weeks or so (we have got to get the new Profile Box done first), but we wanted to get your feedback as soon as possible.

…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.