The MyBlogLog Blog

We've Gone Plaid!

The number one requested feature on our Suggestion Board is a site redesign. We readily admit that our engineering roots show through, emphasis on new features and performance leave us short in the rounded corners and cute animation department.

Today we're pleased to announce that we're launching a new design based on extensive research and field testing on live bunnies. We've settled on a look that is both pleasing to the eye yet does not sacrifice functionality. It also goes great with a pair of khaki dress pants or thick corduroys if that's how you roll.

A couple of us are active members in the Great Color Wars of 2008 and I'd love to say that was the inspiration but Todd actually hatched this plan several days before the Great Call Up. When word of a Plaid Team broke out on Twitter, we took it as a sign.

And now a challenge to you, my dear reader. See if you can find the Easter Egg on the site that leads to the deeper meaning and significance of our gesture. First person to leave a comment on this post with the correct answer wins a small token of our appreciation.

UPDATE: In case you missed it, here's what our pages looked like today. Clicking on the MyBlogLog logo took you to the Prepare Ship for Lightspeed clip from the movie, Spaceballs.

Your Lifestream, Widget-ized

One of the inspirations for the New with Me feature was the poor old About Me page that sits unadorned on many blogs. Usually it's half out of date and most certainly stale. Our goal was to spice this page up, make it place to showcase your latest activity, make it an About Me (right now) page.

Today we're releasing two new widgets that make it easy to embed the latest updates from New with Me into your site as either a sidebar on your main template or our mega, in-page widget which is designed to sit in the body section of your About Me page.

The idea is that as you publish stuff across the web, MyBlogLog busily pulls this stuff in and serves it up to your readers. Your site remains fresh and even if you have been too busy to post anything (guilty!!) your New with Me widget will take care of letting your readers know what else you've been up to. For an example of the in page widget in action, check out my About Me page.

The New with Me option is perfect for your blog's About Me page or sidebar where you can let people know what you've been up to. You also have the option to publish your New with My Neighborhood updates on their own or together in a tab so you can show off what your MyBlogLog contacts are up to as well.

Finally, we give you fine-grained control over which services you want to see on your New with Me badge. If you've listed it in your Services tab, we'll give you a checkbox to include or exclude updates from that service. You may want to just share your last.fm tracks and delicious bookmarks but are not keen on putting in every last tweet or all your blog comments - the choice is yours.

Your *Real* World, Delivered

Following the launch of tag-based activity streams (MyBlogLog Topic Pages), today we are making available a new view on events in the form of New with My World.

New with My World is an aggregation of updates from across the MyBlogLog community of things that match tags in your profile. Specifically, tags that you have added to yourself. Adding tags to your own profile is one way to indicate your interests so it makes sense to pull together data around these tags as another vector to slice through the updates on MyBlogLog. This is in addition to existing views of the lifestream data available from New with Me and New with My Neighborhood.

As you glance through New with My World, you'll see items come up and, where available, the tag that your profile tags will be bolded up front so you can see what is bringing you this information.

On top of each topic page, you'll see the "add to my topics" graphic up top. Adding a topic to your interests, also adds that tag to your profile. The idea is to use New with My World as a way to distill a focused view of your interests and then hit the ol' subscribe button and let MyBlogLog do the heavy lifting for you and spoon feed you the best of the web.

API developers also note that we've added calls to support Topics and New with My World so you can pull this data in for any topic or user. You can read up on all the details over on the Yahoo Developer page for MyBlogLog.

Enjoy!

MyBlogLog Topics, collaborative filtering in action

Activity streams are the new black. New with Me pulls together all your activity across the Net and is  a compelling way to let the world know what you've been doing. Aggregation of your friends' updates are even better. But this is just a starting point, something Todd likes to call, the DNA of social networks. Once you get this data in one place, you're in a position to do some really interesting things.

Today we're updating our Tags pages to include updates from our New with Me system sorted into relevant pages which we're now calling Topics. MyBlogLog started as a place to find people and sites that are associated with your interests. Now, with all the great material being shared with the MyBlogLog community via New with Me, you can easily check out the latest with all the topics you find interesting.

Check out the Topic pages for web2.0, politics, and Easter and you'll find a host of interesting material to browse.

We hope you find this feature useful. The related topics tag cloud in the upper right is pretty cool too. Click on any tag and you'll get a new page, click a tag on any event on the page and you'll get yet another page. One person described it as "going down the rabbit hole" and we think that pretty much describes how addictive this is. If you're looking for the down low on something, be sure to check out MyBlogLog to find out the latest on anything. Yes, pretty much anything.

Report spam link now blocks it too

Is someone a little over-enthusiastic about their product or website? Are their eager messages to you of little value or irrelevant? We have a report spam link next to each message but it leads to a form and, well, no one likes to fill out forms.

Starting today, the report spam link will go directly to a screen to block that message and future messages from that user. You can always go back to your hide/block tab in your profile and lift the block if you want to but the power is in your hands.

If this works, we're thinking of lifting the 20 messages/day limit for contact-to-contact messages. When you leave a message for someone that is your contact, we will not deduct from the daily limit. No need to tax you for chatting up your friends.

Let us know what you think in the comments below and, please, no spam!

Graphing Social Patterns

Todd and I attended the Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Diego this past week and had the opportunity to meet MyBlogLog members and developers as well as announce the public availability of the MyBlogLog API.

The conference series is the brainchild of Dave McClure, a self-professed Facebook "fan boy" and while the first conference six months ago was primarily about the Facebook ecosystem, this one examined about a world in which features and behaviors typical of Facebook break out onto the open web to be used across multiple social networks.

What happens when you aggregate updates into centralized "activity streams" such as in MyBlogLog's New with Me feature? What are the challenges in aggregating this content? What is possible once you have this information in one place? It all comes back to some of the things I wrote about back in July, MyBlogLog: DNS for People

The team also whipped together a hack that uses the MyBlogLog API to experiment with using Bluetooth proximity to locate your social network in physical space. We'll be running this hack at next week's SxSW interactive conference as well so if you're going there, head on over to m.mybloglog.com and register your bluetooth device (laptop or phone) and see if you can find your MyBlogLog friends!