Broadcasting Your Online Life

MyBlogLog is, at its core, a broadcasting platform. What started out as a simple way for a site owner to track visits to their site has flipped around to meet the evolving needs of our users who are looking for ways to get their message out. We've always been about connecting readers to web sites they love. Each time you visit a site and leave behind your photo on someone's Recent Reader widget, you're leaving behind your calling card like those business cards you see tacked up on the local diner's cork board.

Behind that virtual calling card is your profile. We include information about any blogs you have and latest posts from these blogs. Yet, blog posts are only part of who you are online. We upload photos to Flickr, we send out pithy one-liners to twitter, we bookmark points of interest on del.icio.us, we favorite videos for our YouTube collections. We're like digital magpies, collecting shiny points of interest and sharing them with the world around us.

We added the Services tab so you can put in pointers to these other services you use and we've been adding to these services bit by bit and each time you add a new service, the corresponding pointer has been added to your profile on MyBlogLog. The email signature and About Me widget were ways to make these pointers more portable.

But the web is a dynamic place. The next logical step from pointing people off to your activity on these other sites is to bring the updates together into a unified view. Why settle for a static list of pointers when you can harness the power of RSS and what Technorati famously called, the living web?

So with that vision in mind, we set off to pull in the activity taking place across the web based on the pointers you gave us. Internally we called this feature "mylo" which was shorthand for "my life online." Because MyBlogLog is a collection of communities, we wanted to show not only updates you've made but also aggregate updates from everyone you're connected to. We've been playing around with this for several months and tackled difficult engineering problems related to caching and synchronizing these updates across two datacenters.

We're now at the point where it's humming along pretty nicely and want to share what we've built with you. All along, we've been following the conversation around what is now come to be called "lifestreaming" and the recent debate about the privacy implication of pulling together your digital life in one place.

Back to the billboard photo above. The MyBlogLog community is different from most because people join MyBlogLog in order to share. They want people to find out more about them and create rich profiles and surf around and leave their avatars behind because they want people to know they were there (another code name we kicked around was "kilroy" btw). We're confident that most of you will want to have people look at your profile and see what you and your friends have been posting across the web.

But we also subscribe to The Principle of Least Surprise and that gets to the real purpose of this post. Maybe you're not too keen on having all your updates gathered together and made available. We honor all permissions and are only pulling in public data. For example, if you've given us your Flickr feed, we will not pull in any photos that have been marked "private" or photos that are limited to only your friends or family. We plan on making your updates not only public but also available to third parties via RSS and our API. As I said at the top, MyBlogLog is a broadcasting platform.

So now's your chance. If you're uncomfortable in any way, please opt-out of this aggregation by removing your username from any of the fields in the Services tab on your profile. We've made it real easy. If there's a pointer to a service in your profile, we'll follow it and add it to the mix. Once you remove it, we'll blow that data away. It's a simple choice, you're either in or you're out. We plan on releasing this feature in the next week so if you plan on making edits, please do so now.

Of course, we hope you'll stay with us and see where this grand experiment takes us. We're all just learning how powerful this concept is and look forward to hearing your thoughts on this feature as we evolve it.

(image courtesy of mtsofan)

Comments

[Amy]

I really like the profile widget addition :)

[Olivier D. alias ze kat]

I hope you will introduce new lifestream user-experience... Different than "classic" lifestream come from "WP Lifestream Plugin" clones.

I need a competitor ;o) .oO(and good reason to build better product)

[Dan Perry]

Looks like a bunch of great additions. Looking forward to them.

[A Week In The Life of A Redhead]

I love your service and cannot thank you enough for all the traffic you have generated for my blog. I just wish there was an easier way to be a paying community member that doesn't require going through PayPal. I hope with Yahoo aboard this might change soon to make it easier for us who want to contribute ... without Paypal.
Thanks again,
Catherine, the redhead

[Baybiz]

Why don't you let us link into social network sites like http://www.JustExpressing.com or http://www.facebook.com where we have contacts and other posts (pics or videos or music) that are essentially part of our "blogging" ?