Blog Friends latest

We must really start a Blog Friends blog so I can go back to just writing about identity at weaverluke! In the meantime, it seemed about time to write an update on Blog Friends' progress.

Firstly, I'm delighted to report that we closed some more seed investment yesterday, which gives us plenty of runway to launch the upcoming "v.1" release (of which more shortly).

We have 5,422 registered users as I write, and had 22,000 unique people in total use Blog Friends in the last month. Growth is gradually accelerating and currently averages around 150 registrations per day.

In the last few weeks, Benjie has been focusing on optimising the code and server setup in order to cope with our growing user base, along with various bug fixes, feature tweaks, and now support for multiple blogs (a much-requested feature).

So what next?

From user's feedback, and our own observations, we believe that we are doing a great job of serving bloggers and their friends (the reviews have been very kind*), but a lousy job of serving people who may only have heard of these curious things called "blogs", but have no idea how or where to find good ones to read.

For this reason, our forthcoming v.1 release (in a few weeks' time) will focus on redressing this deficit: our aim is that a new user, however little they may be networked on facebook, let alone with bloggers, should get a great experience from the get go!

We also hope to make Blog Friends much more useful and fun for all our users with a set of ratings and recommendation features that will help you, your friends and the whole network find more and more personally-interesting posts.

Finally, they do say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery... ; )

As ever, your feedback and thoughts are treasured—feel free to comment here or drop by our facebook group*.

*Link requires facebook login.

Identity Society—happenings and musings

I found the Mobile Monday "Mobile Digital Identity" event at SUN pretty interesting. Alex Craxton (his report here) did a great job of organising and MD-ing the evening, and the panel session seemed to go well.

As ever, though, the topic of identity quickly escaped the confines of "mobile" and we ended up talking about facebook and its privacy implications! The discussion reminded me a lot of the "Dark Side of Social Media" Chinwag event the other month, with both panel and audience divided between the privacy worriers and the information-must-be-free advocates.

I guess I attempt to span both camps with my "i-together" philosophy, which goes something like this:

It's natural that human beings assert and protect the boundaries of their individual identity in "win-lose" situations (my money, not yours!—"i"); on the other hand, people allow those boundaries to become increasingly permeable to others as they discover mutual interests and common purpose (saving the planet etc.—"together").

The individual and collective aspects of identity look set to weave ever more intricately through one another in our evolving culture, creating all sorts of social patterns at many scales ("i-together"). And networked technologies like facebook and new mobile capabilities are only accelerating the pace of the identity loom's machinations.

A weaver's view, you might say.

Incidentally, Charla and I spent a lovely day with my friend John Madelin and his delightful family yesterday, and John and I took the opportunity to make some good progress on the Identity Society wiki. Do check it out and edit away!

Mobile Digital Identity event at SUN

So I am donning my Identity Society hat on Monday evening and chairing the panel session at the Mobile Monday event on Mobile Digital Identity, held at SUN Microsystems' London HQ.

My friends Dave Birch, Ajit Jaokar and Alan Patrick are amongst the panelists. As I don't pretend to know a great deal about mobile technology, I hope to learn a lot!

Blog Friends has been Scobleized!

Blog Friends is no. 7 on Robert Scoble's list of his favourite facebook apps. An honour indeed. : )