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!

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.

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!