Hacking the nature of existence

Nic Brisbourne concludes a thoughtful post "On widgets, social networks and the nature of existence": "[W]e find ourselves in a situation where internet companies might not even need their own website. A kind of virtual, virtual company if you will…."

I completely agree with Nic's sentiment at a high level. This concept of a virtualised service was what lead i-together to deploy Blog Friends within Facebook in the first place. However, the tactical view from within an early-stage startup like Blog Friends turns out to look subtly different than I expected. I left a comment on Nic's post:

Your "web brand virtualisation via open social nets" point is well taken. As you say, Blog Friends within Facebook is an example of this trend.

However, we are now building a central presence for Blog Friends beyond 3rd-party sites. To start with, we plan to deploy some key new Blog Friends features exclusively at i-together.com, over the next month or so, keeping the main feedreader service within Facebook. Then we intend to comprehensively re-architect Blog Friends around a set of APIs, which will make it relatively trivial to deploy (or for others to deploy) Blog Friends on diverse platforms and devices. (Incidentally, we didn't start off with an API-based approach back in June 2007 because we knew we had to get Blog Friends out as soon as possible to catch the Facebook adoption wave—a decision we still regard as correct.)

But why do we not feel that spreading across multiple social nets alone is an optimum strategy?

Two reasons: firstly, having our own "place" on the web gives us an air of solid independence; it safeguards us against the varying fortunes of any given 3rd-party platform (witness Facebook's fall from grace amongst the In Crowd of late). Secondly, it is *so* much quicker to implement and test features when e.g. FBML and FBJS are not involved, and those features can be a lot richer and run much faster. With our tiny development resources (three of us!), and with competition breathing down our neck, we can't afford to waste even an ounce of effort.

Presence distribution is immensely valuable as a strategy, but the current state of the web and the tech that powers it, along with startup resource limitations can necessitate some toughly pragmatic tactical choices.

My hairstylist is a Blog Friends user

Well, I must say I was pretty chuffed today when my Brazilian hairstylist, Pedro, told me that not only had he taken up my invitation to sign up for Blog Friends, but also that he really likes it and has found some great posts, including one that I had also read and that we both loved—Scoble's "What I've learned in 2007".

How cool is that? : )

Clearly, the days when all hairdressers were interested in was where you were going on your holidays are long gone. Seriously though, Pedro is one of the most thoughtful and interesting people I've met in a while, so the fact he enjoys Blog Friends makes me happy.

A Big Day for Blog Friends

I feel like a bit like a trapeze artist at the moment, arcing through the air between swings. (Admittedly I feel like a trapeze artist very definitely in a metaphorical sense only, as I put my back out yesterday and am hobbling around the flat!)

We took the current Blog Friends service down a few minutes ago, and are now working furiously to get Blog Friends v1 Beta ready for prime time—hopefully sometime later today.

So whether you are an existing or would-be user of Blog Friends, please bear with us: we very much hope the wait will be more than worthwhile.

And the view up here is amaaaaaaaaaazing! ; )

[Cross-posted from The Blog Friends Blog]

Blog Friends v1 Beta launches tomorrow!

I can't quite believe it but it's true—Blog Friends v1 Public Beta launches tomorrow, after months of preparation and weeks of testing and bug fixing (it's hard to convey to those who haven't experienced it just how fiendishly difficult it is to get a complex web service working properly in Internet Explorer ; ).

I'll be blogging about Blog Friends v1 Beta at The Blog Friends Blog tomorrow, but in the meantime you can find some more annotated screenshots of the app in action on our flickr group.

Looking forward to welcoming y'all to the new Blog Friends tomorrow. (If you don't yet have Blog Friends added to your facebook account, just follow this link.) Oh, and the current Blog Friends service will be out of action for much of tomorrow while Benjie updates the servers—not a trivial task now we have over 18,000 users!

Identity, embodied

It's hard to believe that I was posting up to three times daily on this blog just a few months ago. Since dedicating myself to creating, launching and growing Blog Friends with Jof and Benjie in June this year, my to-do list has been continuously overflowing with design, administrative and business tasks, leaving little room in my schedule let alone my head for "identity" blogging.

That said, the real problem has not been a lack of time—it's been a profound shift of point of view on my part. For three years, I was on the outside looking in on the world of web-enabled business. Sitting on a cloud at 15,000 feet and surveying the landscape stretching out below me became a comfortable habit, and the resulting insights and musings ended up on weaverluke blog.

Not that I wasn't working diligently throughout those three years to realise my "i-together" vision of a world where each individual could explore and express their unique identity in rich community contexts. Far from it: I dedicated much of my spare time and my life savings (and then some), to create with various programmers three prototype applications of that vision, and wrote any number of supporting business plan drafts. Then Facebook's Platform came along, and I realised that there was a great market opportunity for a very specific aspect of the i-together vision—the social blog post sharing and discovery service that is now Blog Friends.

Soon afterwards Jof, Benjie and I launched Blog Friends into the world, rapidly gaining real users with real opinions and preferences. There were suddenly a million things to do by yesterday just to keep the service running, let alone planning and building new service features, iterating the business plan, networking with potential employees, partners and investors, and lastly—but actually most importantly—communicating one-to-one with our wonderful and loyal users.

June, July, August, September, October... The months have sped by and weaverluke blog has languished. It feels rather ironic that I've co-created a service for bloggers and blog readers, yet seem to have lost my own blogging mojo so catastrophically! We also now have a blog for Blog Friends itself that will need tending.

So how could what weaverluke blog has been transition into something that supports and is fed by what my life has become? In other words, what's the common thread (a weaver always needs a thread) that runs through my passions for identity and for Blog Friends?

Considering that question for a moment, I realise that as we adjust the designs for Blog Friends v1 by a pixel here, a shade of blue there, and as we plough through the nitty gritty numbers of the i-together business plan, it is all too easy for me to forget what so excited me about i-together and Blog Friends in the first place.

We are all preciously unique, but we have so much in common too. We thrive when we acknowledge and celebrate both our individuality and our commonalities.

I wanted to create a service that taps into these insights to help people discover and share stuff that really interests them, easily and intuitively. And I really feel that with the forthcoming "v1" release of Blog Friends, we are getting a whole lot closer to that goal.

V1 introduces a full-page feed reader, rich feedback options to tune your topic and author preferences and a whole lot more. Jof, Benjie and I have been grafting away for a couple of months on v1, and we're just days away from launching it into private beta testing now (do let me know, along with your facebook id please, if you'd like an invitation!).

Anyhow, this rambling and anecdotal post has wandered off topic, just like my mind has wandered from the purity and abstraction of "identity" these last months into the challenge of actually making something with and for real people! Because at the end of the day, it's all about relationship, right, this identity stuff? About sharing your passion and dreams with others, and witnessing them in theirs.

Hopefully, I can start to do some more of that on this blog and at the Blog Friends Blog from now on.

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.

Blog Friends has been Scobleized!

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

Blog Friends' tendrils spreading

I thought I'd give my readers a quick Blog Friends progress report. : )

As of today, around 1,400 bloggers have signed up to Blog Friends (the official facebook number of over 1,500 is slightly out, according to our logs). Amongst them are many well known bloggers such as Robert Scoble, J.D.Lasica and Ethan Zuckerman. We are growing at about 100 users per day, and churn (people deleting the application) is at a low 8.9%.

Technology, social media and marketing are popular subjects amongst our users' blogs, as might be expected. However, what has been really amazing is tracking in our user logs the incredible diversity of subject and geolocation: we have blogs on ethical palaentology, knitting in New York, Music from the 80s, blogs from India, Africa and China, and many, many more topics. Truly, bloggers are a rampantly eclectic lot!

Benjie, our developer, is on his hols for the next week or so, but we have a load of new features that we are itching to roll out on his return!

Watch this space—or rather, watch your Blog Friends profile box on facebook. ; )

Bloggers' likes—and dislikes!

Three days into the Blog Friends public beta, and a picture of the most common interests and dislikes of bloggers (as told us by our users) is beginning to emerge. Interesting for me, as a musician, to see music at the top of the likes list. Some of the dislikes are quite funny: I have highlighted my favourites for your chortling convenience.

Top interests

1. music (58)
2. technology (55)
3. social media (47)
4. politics (44)
5. web 2.0 (38)
6. blogging (27)
7. media (25)
8. internet (21)
9. photography (20)
10. business (18)
11. marketing (18)
12. social networking (17)
13. science (16)
14. travel (16)
15. art (15)
16. gadgets (15)
17. books (14)
18. mobile (14)
19. movies (13)
20. startups (13)
21. apple (13)
22. social software (12)
23. facebook (12)
24. podcasting (12)
25. education (12)
26. new media (11)
27. philosophy (11)
28. web2.0 (10)
29. blogs (10)
30. culture (10)
31. food (10)
32. pr (9)
33. economics (9)
34. enterprise 2.0 (9)
35. innovation (9)
36. london (8)
37. collaboration (8)
38. entrepreneurship (8)
39. film (8)
40. knowledge management (8)
41. tv (8)
42. news (8)
43. software (8)
44. iphone (8)
45. linux (8)
46. computers (7)
47. family (7)
48. microsoft (7)
49. mac (7)
50. literature (7)
51. identity (7)
52. tech (7)
53. social networks (7)
54. web (7)
55. creativity (7)
56. theatre (6)
57. advertising (6)
58. wine (6)
59. reading (6)
60. public relations (6)
61. community (6)
62. psychology (6)
63. networking (5)
64. cat (5)
65. television (5)
66. history (5)
67. football (5)
68. rss (5)
69. environment (5)
70. journalism (5)
71. finance (5)
72. cooking (5)
73. open source (5)
74. google (5)
75. search engine optimization (4)
76. venture capital (4)
77. twitter (4)
78. communication (4)
79. privacy (4)
80. atheism (4)
81. writing (4)
82. programming (4)
83. stuff (4)
84. productivity (4)
85. gaming (4)
86. life (4)
87. cats (4)
88. design (4)
89. dogs (4)
90. video (4)
91. friends (4)
92. blog (4)
93. trends (4)
94. beer (4)
95. learning (4)
96. social (4)
97. future (4)
98. wiki (3)
99. poetry (3)
100. japan (3)

Top dislikes

1. sports (6)
2. fashion (5)
3. gossip (4)
4. iphone (4)
5. politics (4)
6. dogs (3)
7. gadgets (3)
8. sport (3)
9. celebrity (3)
10. children (2)
11. pop (2)
12. football (2)
13. music (2)
14. kids (2)
15. microsoft (2)
16. sex (2)
17. cats (2)
18. games (2)
19. personal (2)
20. food (2)
21. tennis (1)
22. benjie (1) [our erstwhile developer]
23. us (1)
24. pretentiousness (1)
25. life hacks (1)
26. drugs (1)
27. fish (1)
28. advertising (1)
29. romance (1)
30. creationism (1)
31. parasites (1)
32. scarf (1) [?!]
33. criminal law (1)
34. business (1)
35. hype (1)
36. hot topic (1)
37. jof (1) [our wonderful project manager—hum, tit for tat?]
38. sms (1)
39. poetry (1)
40. fried worms (1)
41. monte cristo (1)
42. internet (1)
43. sap (1)
44. parliament (1)
45. bad (1)
46. nothing (1)
47. mac (1)
48. rants (1)
49. bioconservativism (1)
50. junky stuff (1)
51. h0|2r13u|_ (|-|4&i`c7£rs (1)
52. mpaa (1)
53. patent trolls (1)
54. arrogant. (1)
55. loads (1)
56. us politics (1)
57. hip-hop (1)
58. pineapple (1)
59. apache (1)
60. digital marketing (1)
61. silliness (1)
62. negative people (1)
63. h0|2r13u|_ (|-|4&i`c7£rs (1)
64. jem (1)
65. united states (1)
66. pinheads (1)
67. judgmental people (1) [these last two presumably by different users!]
68. investment. (1)
69. mats (1)
70. drinking (1)
71. general stupidity (1)
72. dogmatism (1)
73. fish&chips (1)
74. windows (1)
75. heights (1)
76. celebrities (1)
77. high maintenance people (1)
78. routers (1)
79. facebook (1) [a bit worrying for us, that one]
80. code (1)
81. dog shit (1)
82. brussels (1)
83. web 2.0 (1)
84. personal finance (1)
85. fascism (1)
86. bugs (1)
87. blogging (1)
88. apple (1)
89. lifestyle issues (1)
90. religious fundamentalism and ignorance of any kind (1)
91. colleges (1)
92. other things (1)
93. avocado (1)
94. journal (1)
95. when people do not respond or thank each other for (1)
96. aging (1)
97. web (1)
98. wifi (1)
99. annoying people (1)
100. environmentalism (1)

Blog Friends public beta is now live!

I'm really pleased to be able to announce that Blog Friends public beta is now open to all! (Well ok, all bloggers with facebook accounts then, if you must nit pick.)

My sincere thanks to all my friends who participated in the private alpha test. In particular, special mention must be made of Alex Newson, who not only gave great feedback on the alpha service, but also provided us with some invaluable pro bono legal advice, and Andy Roberts, who has been tireless in seeking out bugs and feature improvement opportunities.

Also, thanks again to the guys at Brain Bakery, who have done an amazing job at bringing to life the service specifications I delivered to them just 16 days ago.

Finally, my thanks to Savvas Voudouris of Peelme Visual Communications, who has brought an elegance and sophistication to our graphic identity that is second to none. : )

Blog Friends private alpha launched today!

The Blog Friends facebook application private alpha launched today—hooray!

There has been some great feedback from Blog Friends alpha testers so far, which is hugely gratifying. My heartfelt thanks to all my Blog Friends who are currently giving us the benefit of their experience and insight. Also to the tireless Benjie of BrainBakery Ltd, who has coded like a demon over these last twelve days. We are aiming for public beta early next week—at which point I can spill the beans on exactly what it is we are building.

It strikes me that I've been working, with various friends, on myriad iterations of business plans and a number of prototypes for i-together for three and a half years, yet it has only taken three and a half weeks to take Blog Friends (i-together's first service offering) from a twinkle in my eye to launch.

Go figure!

Where (the heck) is weaverluke?

Apologies for the long blog silence. I have been busy raising seed capital (done!) and procuring a development solution (done—development starts today!!) for Blog Friends.

I also will be spending some quality time on the Identity Society wiki over the next weeks, and probably going into hospital to have a tiny fragment of dental filling that is lodged in my sinus removed with a drill and an endoscope (gulp—but I have had a headache since October last year!).

So bear with me, friends. I have not forsaken you. ; )