a blog by Ian Kennedy
Sometimes it’s the simple things. Last week we switched on another piece of the microformats suite and all MyBlogLog profiles now support vCard and hCard formats.
For more details, see the MyBlogLog blog.
For more on Microformats in general and why they’re cool, see Denise Olson’s excellent primer, An Introduction to Microformats.
Todd and I have been busy hanging out over at this week’s Web 2.0 Expo (save one short visit to the nearby Blue Bottle Coffee, thanks Sam!) but the team has been back at MyBlogLog HQ cranking out some cool stuff regardless.
HCard & VCard support – very cool to see these come to light. Todd has the scoop.
MBL Mobile – we brushed off this hack and updated it a bit. Steve wrote a java client (and Chris made a cool Mac installer) that you can download and run on your desktop. It runs in the background and a little bubble pops up when a fellow opted in MyBlogLogger is within Bluetooth range.
Wi-Fi enabled invitations – O’Reilly was kind enough to give us the IP Addresses of the wi-fi routers at the Expo. We now look for any traffice coming from this range and if we see a MyBlogLog member accessing it from this range, we leave them a message on their MyBlogLog profile inviting them to check out MBL Mobile and to stop by the Yahoo booth and say, “Hi”
Collective Intelligence – as we have done before, we use the wi-fi address range to collect a gallery of all the MyBlogLog members that have used the internet via the Web 2.0 Expo routers. We sometimes get around to showing a rank ordered list of the most popular links but didn’t get around to it this time.
MyBlogLog just launched an experiment and a shared account at twitter.com/mybloglog. All of us on the team have twitter accounts and have been tripping over each other using our accounts to respond to people and get the word out to our various, over-lapping pools of followers.
The twittersphere is so noisy anyway that when we sat back and thought about it, having a central voice for MyBlogLog the product just made more sense. There are thousands of MyBlogLog users that have added their twitter accounts to their profile and rather than reaching out to them piecemeal, it just seemed to make more sense to have a single account to handle the outgoing communications.
So a single account to broadcast the occasional shout out or service update is a no-brainer. The harder, experimental part is the listening part. We set up a script that automatically follows anyone that has added their twitter account to their MyBlogLog profile. It’s impossible to keep up with the thousands of conversations going on amongst our members so we’re taking the advice of our very own twitter ninja, Todd and are limiting our listening to just the @mybloglog replies and direct messages.
Who knows what will happen, we’ll have to just go with it a bit and see how it goes. It’s just a few hours since we’ve announced this and the replies are already rolling in at a pretty rapid clip. I’m a little worried because we all have a product to run as well and the interruptive nature of twitter brings out my worst ADD tendencies.
One thing is for certain, this channel is an excellent source of real-time feedback. MyBlogLog releases early and often and we thrive on input to tap us in the right direction or smack us upside the head if we’re dead wrong. The early responses to the follow script range from positive to “what took you so long?” so I think we did the right thing.
Some of the followers have let us know about other companies that are playing around with branded twitter accounts. Here’s a running list so far:
Ironically, it doesn’t seem like @twitter is really used in the same way. Curious.
Update: looks like we’re headed in the right direction. Overnight reactions are almost all positive and the Stop Twitter Spam makes me realize we dodged a bullet by posting about why we were auto-following all 14,000+ that have added their twitter ID to their MyBlogLog profile.
I’ve been doing a lot of posting on the MyBlogLog blog lately because the boys have been busy shipping a number of enhancements to the service that have really changed the nature of the product. What started out as a lightweight stats package and later a social network that connected people to sites and bloggers that shared their interests is now beginning to look like a site where you can not only go to learn more about someone but also a place where you can manage your profile and interests and discover new content around those interests.
Todd called me out for going quiet on this blog with my personal take on some of the work we’re doing so this post will be a whirlwind summary of what’s new in MyBlogLog land over the past few weeks and why I think they are significant.
New with Me – MBL’s version of lifestreaming. Our approach is different because we designed around driving the conversation back to the source. We do not capture comments and force people to mybloglog.com to view any comments about updates streaming across our servers. Our focus is on (a) letting you know what other services your contacts on MyBlogLog have so you can connect with them there and, (b) harvesting meta-data on lifestream events which we use to slice the content in interesting ways. We also do not collect any private data so no anti-pattern asking for your password is required.
New with My Neighborhood – an additional tab on the New with Me view shows you the collective lifestream of your contacts on MyBlogLog. Because we collect only public data, anyone can look as someone else’s Neighborhood feed. Interested in what a prominent VC is following? Check out Fred Wilson’s Neighborhood feed. Use people you trust as a proxy and filter for your news.
New with Me widgets – we’re a widget platform so it makes sense that we would put New with Me into a widget. The one twist is that one version of our widget is designed to take up the entire body of a page. As you add content to places like delicious, flickr, and twitter, the New with Me widget automatically updates your normally static About Me page with your latest activity. While people are talking about the nirvana of data portability where decentralized services keep your chosen hub up-to-date, we’re doing it.
Topics – with all the great content flowing across our New with Me servers, it was time to organize it in a way that is useful outside of the context of the MyBlogLog social network. Because we harvest the tags and other meta-data associated with the New with Me updates, we organize these updates into dynamic topic pages that feature the latest news on any tag. If Wikipedia is a relatively stable set of authoritative links around a certain topic, we aim to be the dynamic equivalent – featuring the latest updates from our members around those topics.
Check out the topic page for College Basketball as well as the Related Topics tag cloud in the upper-right to get a sense of how this works.
New in My World – just as New in My Neighborhood is a mixed feed of updates from your MyBlogLog contacts, New in My World is a mixed feed of updates from topic pages that you follow. There is a direct correlation between tags that you’ve applied to your profile and the tags on the updates you see in this area so we’ve bolded those tags for you so you can understand why you are seeing them. As you follow new topics, those tags are automatically added to your profile. In the past, tags were a way to signal to the world your interests. Through careful tuning of your New in My World feed, the accuracy and relevance of this collection of tags will become even more accurate.
Here’s a link to my New with My World page which I visit on a regular basis. It’s a collaborative filter using the MyBlogLog community which is selecting and tagging the content and serving it up for me, cross-referenced against my stated interest.
We’ll continue to noodle on this concept further and have a number of ideas about how this data can be used. The vision is that what you share with MyBlogLog will not only improve the Topics pages for people browsing around, but also that the act of sharing will improve your interest profile and drive further customizations both on MyBlogLog and partner sites that access your interest profile via the MyBlogLog API. Just as the MyBlogLog Recent Reader widget in the sidebar of this blog operates passively, leaving your avatar behind as a recent visitor of sites such as these, the New with Me feature also operates passively, in the background, as you add activity to your various social services across the web updating not only your activity profile but also your collective interests.
A common complaint overheard at the recent Graphing Social Patterns, ETech, and South By Southwest conferences has been that increased friend invites on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter has devalued the word friend. Today, this condition is unique to the the early-adopter, hyper-connected crowd at tech conferences but as social networks replace our broken email inbox as the primary tool for communication, there is no reason this problem will not impact everyone who uses these platforms.
“Not a day goes by when I get invited to one more social something or other.”
Two things will change:
Management of friend requests will become such a chore that Twitter’s unrequited “follow” command or Doppler’s “Other’s you might know” method of building your social network will become the norm. Asking for an email username and password will be phased out as bad practice at best and a security risk at worst. Thingfo, a new social network service around objects, is doing cool things with the MyBlogLog API to jumpstart it’s community based on your existing social network on MyBlogLog.
Tools will evolve to slice and filter your social networks for greater relevance. One unexplored vector is filtering by physical location. A conference hack that the MyBlogLog team put together that experiments with location-based relevance is at m.mybloglog.com. This hack allows you to claim your unique laptop or cellphone bluetooth ID and bind it to your MyBlogLog ID. Once you’ve done this, the polling app at this site will periodically scan for other bluetooth devices in your area and when it identifies another opt-ed in MyBlogLog member nearby, their avatar will show up on your dashboard.
At a panel discussion this afternoon, Ben Cerveny threw out the concept that with all the tools for managing our friend networks at our disposal, we will have varied “focal depth” to our online and offline friendships. I look forward to the next round of tools that will act as temporary lenses on our world. It’s not as simple as an algorithmic keyword search engine – this new set of tools will need to leverage inputs such as location, time, and interest. The technology is in place but, as with all new technologies, the social norms need to catch up and inform future development of these tools.
A panel discussion at O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns conference with myself, Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), Kevin Marks (Google) and David Recordon (Six Apart) on the rollout of shared activity streams as part of the latest revolution in social network. Moderating was Sean Ammirati of ReadWriteWeb.
Photo by Pinar Ozger
I gave a talk today announcing the public launch of the MyBlogLog API. The is the only API that I know of that allows you to look-up a person’s identifier across social networks. Read the docs here.
Other URLs from the talk:
Blog Juice – a bookmarklet to look-up social activity of recent reader.
Raven SEO – a working example of a portable, social network
Meetspace – using Bluetooth to discover which MyBlogLog members are in your proximity
Update: Slides from the talk posted on Slideshare.
Yesterday was one of the more exciting days of my time here at Yahoo, and I wasn’t even in the office. MyBlogLog shipped a significant new feature which required the whole team to knuckle down and work as one. We hate to ship new code on Fridays so yesterday was the deadline to get something done before Todd & I head out to a week and a half of conferences.
While activity levels were high all week, they really broke into a sprint at 9pm when we all logged on after dinner to quash out our final bugs. I think at one point I had four or five different browser engines running (Firefox, IE, Safari, and even Flock) and next to my Windows PC I was also testing things on my wife’s MacBook.
There was a group chat with all of us on it and, as we ran across things, I would throw them into the chat window to get resolved. A couple of us had other testers out there and they were in other tabs on our IM client so we would throw things between the tabs, channeling the excitement of others too as we sensed we were getting closer to launch.I wish I had saved a log from the running chat session because if you could read it, you would plainly see how closely tuned everyone on the team is to each others style.
It was like a written version of the dance you see that goes on in the kitchen of a very busy restaurant. Everyone is running around but knows exactly where everyone else is, what they are doing and when it needs to come together. Later in the evening, folks from the Bangalore team logged on and joined the fray. Distance didn’t matter – they were right there with us.
I’m privileged to work with such a great team of talented people and am constantly bowled over by what they can do when they put their mind to it. We’re on a roll folks. There’s even more cool stuff on its way!