Super-cookie service MyBlogLog just emailed users to let us know about a new "friend finder" the site is offering. The feature is remarkable because it makes it really easy to add your friends from around the web - without asking you for any passwords! With just a few clicks your friends on services from Flickr to FriendFeed can become your friends on MyBlogLog. I wish everyone did that. Here's a few bullet points on the implementation that could be helpful for other application developers to consider.

• This doesn't just work with early adopters. Most services have you "add friends" by asking for your email password because that's where most of the online world has most of its friends. It's creepy though and a bad practice to do that. MyBlogLog can grab the "Friend of a Friend" (FOAF) data from your public profiles at services like Flickr, Facebook and MySpace - hardly a tiny set of bleeding edge users. Your application could consider doing the same. Think also about using the new GMail contacts API.
• There's still no "add all" link. In what I assume was a silly oversight, there's no link to "add all" when you pull up your friends from these networks. You have to add them one at a time. It would be nice to be able to select all and then deselect a few. That's no small thing, it would make a big difference in growing the service and I assume they will fix that soon. As it is, the list of 20 friends at a time gets mixed up a bit like FriendFeed recommendations. Implementation of both are clunky though and could scale much better by presenting more options at once and displaying more information about users you are prompted to add as friends.
• Service discovery could be faster. MyBlogLog is "discovering friends" via the public profile pages you filled out in your MBL profile. That process presents you with a long list of services from around the web and asks you to fill in the part of profile URLs where your username goes. Everyone should check out how Lijit discovers new accounts from other sites. It asks you "what is your most common username" and then searches to see where it can find an account with that username. You then confirm or deny each one and can enter exceptions to your standard username on any particular service. It's really smooth and smart. I wish MyBlogLog and everyone else did it that way.

Almost every service on the web wants to connect users with their friends elsewhere, for aggregate activity feed displays or "viral introductions." There are some best practices emerging for doing that, though. Companies looking to implement such features should take a look at oAuth and at Niall Kennedy's recent post on user authentication best practices. If you want to see something cool about MyBlogLog, I'd also recommend checking out the BlogJuice bookmarklet. You'll like it, I promise.

One of my consulting clients is a company called Iterasi, providers of a browser plug-in that lets users "notarize" a perfect replica of any web page's current state. That includes forms and AJAX states. It's a pretty potent tool and one that I'm really excited to use for my own research...once there's a Mac version available! (Coming soon, they say.) The company is doing a great job of using social media, including a prolific blog that I designed for them and now a series of short videos produced by my former co-worker at SplashCast, Alex Williams. You can read about our very successful use of social media for marketing at our previous place of work in this post.

I've been hesitant to write about Iterasi here just because I generally don't write about consulting clients (though I did in my last post too, so maybe things are changing). Alex did a short video interview with me that went up yesterday, though, and I realized after watching it that I should make sure any readers using Windows know about it right away. It's really useful! I want to use it and will officially give them a hard time for not having the Mac version done yet, as I told them many bloggers would. Seriously, I'm anxious for its imminent completion.

Below is that video we did together about one way I want to use Iterasi. Here's a page of links to press they got for their launch, which I advised on. At the end of this post is a screencast demonstration of the product's functionality, which was produced by Rick Turoczy of Return Corp (and the fantastic local blog SiliconFlorist!). I tried to produce a screencast but had issues. Hire me for overall strategy and RSS work and you'll be very happy - don't hire me to produce screencasts!

Read on to watch the videos.
(more...)

I'm excited to unveil my latest consulting project, a fairly extensive RSS-based microsite put together with Sun Microsystems for next week's JavaOne conference. It's called BlogCentral. Turns out today is international RSS Awareness Day! This might have been a better fit for Enterprise RSS Awareness Day last week, but that's ok.

I don't often blog about particular consulting projects because most of the work I do is with pre-launch companies or for internal use only, but consulting is what I spend one to two thirds of my day doing after I finish blogging at ReadWriteWeb.

The Project

After building out a collection of RSS feeds that attendees could use to track the DEMO conference in January, I was approached by Sun about helping build a blog coverage microsite to track discussion of their giant JavaOne conference that starts next week.

This is an example of one end of the RSS spectrum, most use cases are far simpler - so don't be scared!

JavaOne is a huge conference where scores of attendees will be blogging about a wide variety of Sun products and announcements. I worked with Sun to create a page called BlogCentral (hopefully to be moved to sun.com/blogcentral by conference time!) that aggregates all the latest and the most popular blog posts about the conference and 15 particular Sun projects and products. It's like a news dashboard for anyone interested in seeing what's being written about at JavaOne.

How We Did It

(more...)

I was honored to be interviewed by Dave Winer today in a 20 minute podcast about the service FriendFeed and other RSS applications. Winer helped birth a wide range of technologies like RSS, podcasting and OPML (bundles of RSS feeds that you import and export from feed readers). He's a tech hero and I don't know what my life would be like without his work.

Read on for a Flash audio player and links that we discussed.
(more...)

I wrote this post on ReadWriteWeb for Marshallk.com originally as it had been such a long time since I last posted here, but I showed the screencast I made for it to Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb and he asked me to post it there instead. I was happy to do so, but do want to point it out to readers here. I post a lot at RWW but I think this one will be of particular interest to readers here.

The highlights of the post are the link to this Wired article about the economy of screen scraping (great article) and this screencast about how to use Dapper that I finally recorded.

These types of tools are things I use often in my consulting work. They are really exciting and worth a close examination by anyone who reads this blog.

I had a great time this afternoon doing an hour long consulting session with some young European entrepreneurs who were considering adding a social network to a popular local niche content site they had recently acquired. I advised them not to do so, but that advice was tongue in cheek.

I suggested that instead of adding a social network to their site, they should just add rich user profile pages, site-mail (user-to-user messaging) and the ability for users to track each other's content. Add personal publishing to this list (their site already offered this) and what have you got? All the useful traits of a social network, without the Yet Another Social Network baggage.

Social networks have caught on for a reason - they offer functionality that's very useful for a lot of people in many different communities of interest. That said, everyone is wary of copy-cat, roach-motel, me-too social networks. Why not have your cake and eat it too? By framing the extension of your existing site as just that, an extension of your existing users' profile capabilities, instead of as a social network launch - you can make everyone happy and maintain your dignity.
(more...)

I'd like to do some consulting for some environmentally focused businesses next year. As part of that effort I'm pitching a relevant trade journal with an article idea. That's not something I've done before, but for now that's beside the point. I write to you here to ask- what do you think of the following as a succinct explanation of the power of blogging and RSS? I thought you might enjoy reading it and comparing notes.
(more...)

As part of some recent consulting work, I spent some time looking at the new people-search engine from Squidoo called SquidWho (it is not Squidoo I was consulting for). SquidWho is an interesting service that may or may not be worth using (in most cases I think not) but there are a lot of things the team is doing very, very well. It's worth checking out the site's user experience and use-flow; it's all quite well put together.

The one thing I haven't been able to get out of my head in the weeks that have passed since I tried the service out is how easy it was to get started with SquidWho. It's simple, really - and I was kind of kidding about using the word unforgettable in the title of this post, but I really do keep thinking about it. It's more like it's unnoticeable for once!

Easy login is important because there are so many web applications launching every day that yours should be as pleasing to use as possible at every step or you'll loose out on the use and advocacy of early adopters - at the very least.
(more...)

One of my favorite clients that I've consulted with in recent weeks is a Massachusetts based company called Softrax. I helped put together a unique and powerful newswire system for their website RevenueRecognition.com. The site's subtitle is "revenue management resources for today's financial executive."

Softrax came to me with almost no experience in using new web applications and by the time our work together was done they had a topical OPML file, a system to easily aggregate industry news on their website and a solid initiation into the web 2.0 experience. This case study is an example of one sort of plan I help clients strategize and implement.
(more...)

In case you're interested in joining us for any of these, I recommend them all highly. Big thanks to organizers for the invites.

New Media for Nonprofits
Meyer Memorial Trust

I'll be leading a session on "the ROI of blogging." There will be 3 or 4 other sessions as well, about things like online video and RSS. If you're in Portland and into npo work, you might like to join us.

Friday, October 19th at PNCA in Portland

Sam Whitmore's Media Survey
mediasurvey.com

Sam Whitmore does weekly by-subscription teleconferences with media pros (including new media ones, apparently!) and has been one of my heroes for some time. It's a real honor to be a guest there. Sam's site is by subscription only (free trials available) but he does have a new, public blog that's worth subscribing to. If you're not familiar with Sam, you'll start noticing his name around some of the best tech podcasts on the web now that you've read it here.

Phone call is Tuesday, October 16th at 1:00 PST

Blog World Expo
blogworldexpo.com

I'm speaking a couple of times at the BlogWorldExpo on November 7th through 9th in Las Vegas. It's going to be a very good conference, judging from the speakers list and the background of organizer Rick Calvert, a long time trade show man who has dove in head first to social media.

November 7th - 9th in Vegas, flights and registration are inexpensive - you should really think about going. See http://blogworldexpo.com