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.

A paen to the social web

A great post from Euan Semple which resists partial quotation, so here it is in full (presented under the terms of a Creative Commons license!):

A recent client engagement combined with reading Nick Carr's review of Everything Is Miscellaneous have yet again made me question whether those of us who drank The Cluetrain kool-aid seven years ago are mad or simply facing the growing pains of a new world as it emerges from the old.

Sometimes it seems that the naysayers are right. There is nothing fundamently different about the web and human nature stays the same no matter what technologies we have to hand. Having read John Gray's Straw Dogs I am aware that ideas of progress are pretty relative and while that at one level technology has enabled us to save more people through medicine it has also enabled us to kill more people more efficiently. Did the printing press make the world a better place or did it just allow ideas to circulate faster and wider?

The apparent simplicity of what we are talking about also presents challenges. In a world where real work takes effort and things worth doing are hard the apparent promise of the transformative effect of "getting it" appears, and sometimes feels, naive. Helping people to "get it" appears a soft option in contrast to doing or building.

And yet, and yet ....

I am only half way through David's book but I have to say I am loving it just as much as I loved The Cluetrain and Small Pieces Loosely Joined. What has happened to me since embracing the web has felt transformational and enabled connections and relationships that would never have happened otherwise. And these are not just appealing because they enable cozy conversations between like minded people. They enable exchange of ideas at a frequency and a quality that I never experienced before. I have also seen at first hand the effect this capability can have on an organisation. Being able to get quick, quality answers to questions, get collective heads around major cultural issues, and fostering connections that spark innovation are all non-trivial things that all organisations aspire to but which are notoriously difficult without web approaches.

It is good to catch ourselves sometimes and question the things we take for granted - whatever our views. But I am glad to report that I still get excited about the ways that the web is making the world different as described so well by David and others and I feel lucky that I get to pass on that excitement to the people I work with.

Ironically, given that Nick Carr makes much of the fact that he didn't get past page 9 of David's book I gave up on his tedius, rather self-indulgent post after the first couple of paragraphs.

Euan, you really put your finger on the issue here. The naysayers are too busy seeing the fragments of the evoving web to see either the mysterious and majestic evolution of the whole or the incremental increases in intelligence enjoyed by each one of us who engages authentically within conversations with others who we just wouldn't have been able to dialogue with pre-web.

I know that I am a more effective thinker and communicator than I used to be thanks to my blogging (although I also know there's still infinite room for improvement—which, of course, is a great motivator to continue the process), and I see you and all the other bloggers I read becoming better thinkers and communicators each post, week, month and year that goes by.

What a blessing!