everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: MyBlogLog

  • Positive Interference

    Yesterday I commented on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog on a fundamental difference I see between Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed and MyBlogLog and I wanted to expand a bit further here in the name of thinking out loud and getting a sense of what others think.

    As I announced on the MyBlogLog blog a couple of weeks ago, we are getting close to releasing a feature which publishes an aggregated view of all your updates from services such as flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube, twitter, and others. This aggregated event stream has been called a number of things (vitality feed, activity stream, lifestream, mini-feed) but we’re simply calling it New with Me.

    As more sites add this feature, there seems to be two approaches to what to do with this data. One the one hand you have sites like Wink and Profilactic which simply pull in updates and republish them. MyBlogLog’s approach is like this. On the other, you have sites such as Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed which are hosting specific actions such as adding comments around the content aggregated on their sites.

    The question is, what is the value of hosting comments on a site that is removed from the place that generated the content? If I’m feeding my updates to a site such as Pulse or FriendFeed, I would rather be able to keep the conversation threads all together on my site or at least tie them together with something like a trackback to pull in threads if the discussion jumps over to another venue. The way Pulse and FriendFeed are built, your readers can never know what additional discussion is taking place which makes it an open loop of dis-jointed conversations that may never come together.

    Bret Taylor from FriendFeed responded with a perspective that shed light on his perspective which didn’t occur to me. In his response to my comment on Jeremy’s post, Bret says that FriendFeed is less a distribution platform but more, “a forum for private discussion with people you know.” But why break off what likely to be the most thoughtful commentary and keep it from the others that might benefit from it if they are not your friend?

    I look for inspiration from a broad variety of sources and thrive on the serendipity of unintended consequences. This morning I was listening to a podcast because there was a mention of a term I follow that dropped it into one of my tracking feeds. In it, Jeff Schmidt, a bassist that is also quite thoughtful on the latest social media technologies threw out a line that struck me.

    I love being open to the possibility of positive interference.

    That describes what I most love about the online world in which we live. The way that someone halfway around the world can stumble into your world and zap you with a turn of phrase that crystallizes a new way of looking at things. This happens best in a world where comments are open and thoughts are shared together in a way that everyone benefits. It’s all about Doc Searls’ Snowball.

    Bret and I are on a panel together next week at the Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Diego and I really look forward to learning more what others think. It should be a fascinating discussion!

  • Hard at Work and Shipping Again!

    A quick note to let folks know that the MyBlogLog team made it through the staff reductions at Yahoo intact. Heads down is a common expression around here and it’s apt because we’ve been hammer and tongs on getting things built that we’ve been thinking about for a long time. It’s great to be shipping again!So far, our About Me widget has been getting rave reviews. We also have an API that’s in beta and spinning off some really interesting applications. Finally, yesterday we’ve got our updated Recent Reader widget into the wild and that’s getting great reviews. Congrats to the entire MyBlogLog team, especially Manny Miller who’s been in the weeds with the widget code from the start.

    We’ve got more up our sleeves and I’m looking forward to meeting folks at Graphing Social Patterns, eTech, and South by Southwest to talk about it.

  • MyBlogLog API

    MyBlogLog API

    Thanks to an unsolicited write-up by Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb the story about the MyBlogLog API has been getting some coverage. The API is currently an invite-only beta while we get some people to take a look at it and give us some feedback. The API is interesting not only because of the public data such as user & site tags unique to the MyBlogLog index but also because of the ability for the API to act as a pointer to other sources of data.

    Each member on MyBlogLog has a “Services” tab which allows them to share pointers to their profile on other sites such as Digg, Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. In this way, the MyBlogLog API can serve as a lookup that can tell you where to find someone on these other sites and pull together a more complete view of someone across the web. The MyBlogLog API delivers on a vision we’ve had for the service, a DNS for People.

    The web is a collection of digital artifacts. Text, photos, sound files are by-products that are digitized and indexed. We use search engines to locate these artifacts but no one has built a way to tie all these artifacts back to their owner.

    Until today. Yahoo’s very own Kent Brewster was quick off the mark with his own hack which surfaced links to these other profiles of recent visitors as well as, if available, the most recent Twitter post. Aldon Hynes posted at length this weekend and I look forward to seeing him explore member relationships using the API as he did so when he posted his detailed images of his MyBlogLog Social Graph.

    I’m really happy to see this vision of MyBlogLog API as a building block coming together and am proud to see MyBlogLog play a role in making these connections easier to find making the web a little easier to use. As with any effort such as this, there were numerous people that played a role in getting this off the ground but there are a few key individuals who deserve special mention:

    Chris Goffinet was the lead engineer who built the thing over the course of a week and then tuned the heck out of it over its several incarnations.

    Todd Sampson & Eric Marcoullier (MyBlogLog co-founders) have been pushing for this API since day one and are basically the API’s patron saints.

    JR Conlin & Kent Brewster (from the Yahoo Developer Network) were both invaluable for early feedback, cheerleading, and general code-wrangling.

    If you’re interested in getting on the list for the beta, sign up and let us know what you’re working on.

  • Why verify?

    MyBlogLog just pushed out a release which allows you to “claim” ownership of your MyBlogLog profile. It’s dead easy.

    Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

  • Everyone loves a contest

    Nothing gets bloggers’ juices flowing better than a leaderboard. Today we launched a friendly little contest to see who can add the most users to their MyBlogLog community between now and the end of the month. Face it, we’ve all been there – how many friends do you have on MySpace? How many of Facebook? How many are following you on Twitter? Now’s your chance – tell your friends to join your blog’s community on MyBlogLog and if you end up on top, we’re offering a bevy of fabulous prizes to help you blog better.

    Details here. Be sure to join my community while you’re at it!

  • MyBlogLog, more than just faces on a page

    Most people first notice MyBlogLog as the service behind the Recent Readers widget you see on various sidebars like the one over at TechCrunch, Yodel, or PassiveAggressiveNotes. Once you spend a little time with the service you’ll see that it’s a whole lot more. Yeah, we have stats. They’re basic but that’s the idea. Keep it short and sweet and give you a quick snapshot of the basics. Where your visitors came from, what they looked at, and where they went.

    hot in my communitiesOne feature that I feel is an overlooked gem is the “Hot in My Communities” area. On every person’s profile you’ll see this feature in the upper right hand corner. What’s here is a ranking of the ten most popular links from all the pages in your communities. For those that are not MyBlogLog users, communities are websites that you join during your travels across the web. You can either explicitly join a community or set a preference for the number of pages of a site you need to view before you are automatically joined (the default is 10). The idea is to keep the communities you join as you would a list of friends in a social networking site, ones that align with your interests. The Hot in My Communities feature is one reason why. We normalize this list against its overall traffic and popularity so that even if the site doesn’t get thousands of pageviews, if a link is “popping” on one of these sites, it’ll show up in your Hot in My Communities list.

    This feature is really cool and acts like a little recommendation engine. You should see a mix of sites that you’ve already visited and links that are most likely going to be interesting because it’s what others that share your reading habits are visiting. If your My Communities area is like a bookshelf of sites you visit on a regular basis, then the Hot in My Communities are is like a dynamic list of pages that have been dog-eared for reference. While a visit to a site like Techmeme gives you a view of what’s hot for everyone, Hot in My Communities is a filtered view of what’s interesting based on sites that you follow. A personalized view.

    Now that we have the integration of Yahoo IDs behind us the team has been going after some low-hanging fruit that we have wanted to get to for a long time. Today we released a feature that allows you to better manage your communities via the Hot in My Communities area. As you look through the list of links served up for your browsing pleasure, you’ll notice a question mark (?) next to each link. If you click on this link, you’ll get some information about which of your communities gave you this link. Just like you would manage your subscriptions in a feed reader, if you’re consistently getting irrelevant links within your list, you can chose to prune your Communities list and remove those that are not interesting to you. Conversely, if you are browsing someone else’s profile and you see a link you like, you can click through and join that community. Robyn has a nice write up on the feature over on the MyBlogLog log.

    Happy Browsing!

  • What is a Product Manager anyway?

    My 5 year old daughter just started Kindergarten this week and she asked me to explain to her exactly what I did at Yahoo so she could convey this to her class. She barely uses a computer so I was a bit challenged but then I remembered a great post by Susan Mernit that summed it up nicely.

    When I describe my job to non-techie friends, I like to say it’s like being the executive chef in a big restaurant because as big piece of my job is deciding what to send out when, and another is to review and roll up all the possibilities and then recommend what we actually build and empower the teams that build it.

    We’ve been washing the pots and pans for the past little while but once that’s done, the chefs are chomping at the bit to put out some great new stuff.

  • Eric leaving MyBlogLog

    I’m really sorry to see Eric go. Being the "Tom of MyBlogLog" he was not only your first friend after signing up for MyBlogLog, his personality defined the community as only a co-founder can. I’ve only worked with Eric for a couple of months but it’s been a blast. Some things I’ll miss:

    • whiteboard sessions, the man can’t think without a marker in his hand
    • pointers to some internet meme that you’d never heard of (I’ll never be able to listen to Fallout Boy without laughing)
    • random interjections of "dude" and "rock on" just to keep the serious types on their toes
    • shorts & combat boots in the office, why not?
    • that aging orange and black "They Might Be Giants" t-shirt

    Robyn’s stepping into the "First Friend" role and while she’s a bit nervous, I know she’s going to do just fine. I’ll be posting more as the voice of the product along with Todd. I’m not Eric but hopefully I can keep things just as interesting in my own way.

    UPDATE: Eric’s blogging over at www.marcoullier.com

  • Do you like working fast & furious?

    We’re running pretty fast and have a whole slew of new features at MyBlogLog we are chomping at the bit to get out the door. We’re also about the quick and dirty, especially if it seems innovative and fresh. The video job posting above is part of that. It’s pretty obvious when you see this that we didn’t plan any of this and basically had these folks come in, grab what footage they could while we worked and then splice it all together into something decent.

    I think it works. See the posting on standoutjobs.com for details.