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 has been Scobleized!

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

weaverluke—now also on Facebook!

So I followed the stampeding herd and set up a weaverluke outpost on Facebook. If we aren't "friends" there already, please do stop by and friend me. : )

Nuanced relationship and Facebook

Michael Arrington writes:

When you confirm a friend on facebook, you are asked to state how you know the person. But the options are simply too narrow. “We hooked up” is rarely an appropriate way to describe someone you know through blogging, networking, etc. In fact, most of the options are not really useful for the millions of non-college student adults flooding into the service. It’s time to add more options.

The underlying problem here is that we all think about and express the nature of our relationships in different ways, but computer systems aren't yet very good at inferring similarities between these different descriptions. Which is why they straightjacket us into using a few, standardised descriptions, rather than allowing us to make up our own.

Roll on natural language research for the inspiration of better data integration system design! Until we progress in that area, I suspect these kind of data standardisation issues will remain rather intractable.

Facebook's identity blinkers

Peter Parkes wants to know why Facebook doesn't show him ads that correspond to his identity.

I’m ineligible for their basketball promotion, and can’t join the US Army—yet Facebook insist on showing me ads for them. Irritating, and commercially suboptimal.

This tendency to focus primarily on serving and monetising the huge and homogenous US market, at the expense of other countries' citizens, is a natural tendency of many US-based startups. Hopefully, as the web and its associated economies continue to mature, US startups will come to see the value in thinking a little more globally.