/Blip Of The Week: MyBlogLog

Seeing a mention in Micropersuasion, I took a look at MyBlogLog, which is a social networking app supporting communities of blog readers and authors.

I signed up, joined a few communities (Fred Wilson's A VC, Jeff Clavier, Micropersuasion, etc.). I hope that the density of communities will get large enough there that I could start to wander the "neighborhoods" of blog denizens to discover new stuff.

I do have some issues with the site:

• It's kind of ugly, frankly -- Needs a facelift, and a calmer color scheme. The widgets should be styleable somehow. (See the "Recent Readers" widget in the right sidebar? No way to change the colors.)
• Ajax -- Would speed up some of the editing.
• The "Hot in my Communities" is not enough of a social lens -- What I would like to see is what my contacts have read, and what they think about it. The messaging/reading model is too disconnected for me, and just seeing what is "hot" is too generalized. The "Nerdvana" buddylist is what I want: my list of contacts and what they have recently read, and (optionally) a one liner (tags, phrase, whatever) of their impressions.
• The neighbors needs to be pruned -- Should be based on a cluster analysis, not just membership in any community I am a member of. Closest neighbors would be those who belong to all the communities I do.
• Tagging, commenting, etc -- Need to open up the gestural space in the communities and profiles, so that the participants will be able to participate more fully.
• Customizable home page -- Why not?
• Analysis of outward links -- Could create an explicit network of blogs based on cross links.
• More widgets -- if/when there are more forms of participation (like tagging) built into MyBlogLog, then it would be reasonable to stick that stuff back into the blog.

  But I like it, and invite you all to join the service, and sign up for the /Message community. It's a good idea, and given some tighter integration via widgets, could become a way to create a cross-blog social media networking world.

  tags: social+media, mybloglog, social+networking, social+tools, social+lens, nerdvana

Comments

[Fred]

I believe it also needs better privacy controls. People are going to want to control whether or not their profile shows up on the sites they are visiting. This service has potential - but the assumption that people want their traffic patterns to be completely transparent is flawed.

[Scott Rafer]

Morning Stowe,
Thanks for the attention and good wishes. Much more quickly than we were able, you mirrored a number of our product development conversations. In my mind, your comments fall into three categories, two of which (#2 and #3 below) I'd like to push back a little and see where we get.

1. Spit 'n polish and better member filtering algorithms -- no issue on more widgets, color picker for the widgets, CSS control (a big one on our list!!!) and installing a half-dozen additional servers to run better statistics, etc. We'll running hard, hopefully we'll take steps that keep making people happier.

2. UI & tools including AJAX, brash colors, tagging, etc. -- The community tools we launched Friday are the outgrowth of an 15-month old click-reporting system which now accumulates information on 2.5M people a day (yesterday's number) and over 30M people a month. It's used on USAtoday's blogs, Rosie O'Donnell's blog, all of Gawker Media's, and a huge fraction of the gossip world. We're really hoping to bring a broad cross-section of people into the system, rather than recreate StumbleUpon. The broader crowd isn't very comfortable with the "classic" Web2 UI and tools you suggest. They really seem to like the "Dairy Queen" aesthetic we selected. Any better way of walking the line that you see?

3. Privacy, privacy, and privacy -- We briefly tested "Nerdvana" a bit. To make it work at scale, it needs to auto-publish where you've been on a fairly public page. It gives everyone who sees it the heebie-geebies -- and for very good reasons, we believe. It's too much info to be sharing without the kinds of very complex and layered privacy controls that have been a big drag on Yahoo 360 adoption.

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