MyBlogLog has more personal information about millions of blog readers than any other system we know, it's ripe for offering this kind of service and we're excited to see it come to fruition.

Just for You is on one level a pretty simple service. When a MyBlogLog visitor visits a site with the plug-in running, the system looks at the tags that user provided for their interests when they created their MyBlogLog account. It then finds blog posts with the same categories or tags and serves them up in a widget.

Right: MyBlogLog's Ian Kennedy is using the plug-in on his blog and it knows I like RSS. Oh yes I do.

The most interesting part, though, is it recommends posts with different but similar tags as well. "The weighting for a user's interests ranges from 10, a direct match between your posts' tags/categories and their MyBlogLog tags to 1, a loose coupling," the MyBlogLog team says. The company wouldn't tell us how exactly it does this analysis, but the algorithm was built by two members of the Yahoo! Bangalore team, Mani Kumar and Saurabh Sahni. It's very cool.

When non-MyBlogLog visitors come to your site, they will be shown recommendations based on tags from the most recent MyBlogLog users who have been there. That sounds like a good solution.

We asked the MyBlogLog team if they were going to offer further recommendations based on tags found in other accounts users have associated with their MyBlogLog profile, like Delicious or Last.fm. They said they had some top secret magic in the works for that. We'd also love to see a plug-in for other blogging platforms, like MovableType for us here at RWW.

MyBlogLog - an Incredibly Important API

MyBlogLog is a fascinating service. People expose an incredible amount of personal information about themselves in exchange for being able to see the faces of people who read their blogs. It's big outside of tech circles, too.

When the service launched its API in January, we said it was going to be a big deal. When Yahoo's Kent Brewster built the BlogJuice widget, we found functionality that we continue to use almost every day here at ReadWriteWeb. Why, we wonder, are all the coolest things built on the MyBlogLog API being built in house at Yahoo! and not by other members of the development community at large? The company says they don't know, if developers have thoughts we'd love to hear them.

Just For You is a great example of what this API can do. There are countless companies that have raised millions in venture capital to offer publishers recommendation systems for their readers - commercial publishers pay big money for this functionality. Now bloggers can have the same type of thing for free and base recommendations on the self-identified interests of their readers. That's really powerful.

We continue to be impressed by what this team is able to do with user data. This is just the kind of thing that gets us really excited about the web.

Communication works better when you have a good idea who it is you're talking to. How can new online services get users to describe themselves, though?

LinkedIn = Boring but Effective

One of the most well known ways to get people to fill out their profiles is the way LinkedIn does it. Users are shown a progress bar and told that their profile is "X% completed." This is probably effective but some people tell us it makes them feel guilty.

It's much better than nothing, but let's look at some more creative and fun solutions.

What's Your Most Common Username Elsewhere?

Personal search engine Lijit does a great job of making it easy to associate your account with them with all kinds of other accounts you own around the web. It's simple: they just ask what your most common username is and then they check for public profiles with that username on a long list of different services. In just moments, with a handful of keystrokes, all kinds of info about you can be gathered together.

It's the first step new users take when they click the button to register on the site. You can exclude certain accounts, add particular usernames for accounts where you use a different one. It's incredibly elegant and a great model that others would do well to emulate.

We suspect that social media ping server Gnip will make this kind of approach all the more powerful and easy for application developers to implement soon.

Once you've got usernames from these services, why not display recent activity feeds on their profile pages? That's kind of how Jive Software's ClearSpace does it (see image on the left) and we think that looks great.

Did You Know...?

Another interesting approach is to offer users information about the activities of other people in aggregate and use this as an opportunity to prompt them to provide more information about themselves.

Social recommendation service (and, disclosure, RWW sponsor) Strands, for example, presents customers of Spanish bank BBVA with messages like the following: "Grocery spending: A married person spends 103% more on groceries than a single person. By the way, are you married or single?" That's interesting to know and would motivate me to answer the question with a click.

How else could this be done? Check out categorized Twitter directory Twellow, where Twitter user bios are categorized by interest and occupation. It's a great way to find like minded Twitter users, but imagine if Twello (or another app) said something like this to users: "We see that you are an accountant - did you know that Twitter users who are accountants tend to post more photos to Flickr than Doctors do, but fewer than people in Defense related fields do? If you'd like to tell us what your Flickr username is, we'll connect it to your Twitter account here."

Maybe it could be done more elegantly than that, but you get the idea.

Similarly, eco-credit card company Brighter Planet tracks your personal ecological impact but starts each user out with the median numbers for people in their geographic area and works backwards.

Messages like the following greet users when they login to their Brighter Planet account: "You live with one other person and you use 15% green electricity. Improve your profile by telling us about the car you drive and your flights."

You Look Like George Bush

Brand spanking new social news site SocialMedian assigns a big picture of a famous (or infamous) person as each new user's avatar. My default profile was graced with a photo of Bill Gates, but other people start out with George Bush - something that must get a lot of new users to click the "change my photo" link. It's a witty idea and we wonder just how far it could be taken.

"You are 15 years old, clean up after circus animals for a living and love Britney Spears videos on TV. (unverified - not true? click here to edit your profile.)" Oh yeah, that could work.

I Heard About You On Twitter

If you've used red hot social lifestreaming app type thing FriendFeed, you've probably wondered why, with everything the service knows about you, there's no place to see bio info about other users on their FriendFeed user pages. Enter Hao Chen's FriendFeed Profile script for Greasemonkey. Every time you visit a the user page on FriendFeed of someone who has associated their Twitter account with their FF account (everyone) - this script grabs their bio info from Twitter and slaps it up on their FriendFeed page. It's fantastic!

Why not let users of your app opt-in to populate their profiles with publicly available profiles from other accounts? (I'm here on FriendFeed by the way, if you'd like me to feed you like a friend.)

Still More Ways to Do It

OpenID accounts usually have some profile info associated with them. Some apps pull that info. The OpenID community is working hard, if slow, on "attribute exchange" - a protocol that would flesh this out all the more.

MyBlogLog is a widely used social network for blog readers where you can find headshots of millions of people, their demographic info, interests and many associated accounts from other social networks. Have you tried out the BlogJuice bookmarklet to see the job titles or your blog's most recent visitors, via LinkedIn? It's SO much fun!

If you don't mind renting users from Facebook, the new Facebook Connect login and profile system looks pretty hot too. For some reason people don't appear to put as much fake info about themselves into Facebook as they do other places - it's a rich source of user profile data and comes with the added comfort of extensive privacy controls. The downside is that putting this much control in the hands of Facebook is pretty creepy.

Conclusion: It Doesn't Have to Be Hard Anymore

There's not a whole lot of excuses any more for asking users of your brand new website to fill in a whole lot of information about themselves. Nor is there for having super anemic user profiles, which leave new users totally uninspired to connect with each other. You need users connecting as quickly as possible in your apps and rich profiles really help.

What other ways have you seen apps solve this problem? We're sure there are many more creative examples and we'd love to find out about them!

The handsome devil at the top of this post is Flickr user thomas pix.

If you do happen to be a blog owner, you can add your blog (if not already present) by uploading an HTML file to your blog. However, this is considered the "Advanced" way to claim ownership. Keeping in mind that this app's users may not be as technically savvy as others, the app presents another way to confirm your blog: have your friends verify your blog for you. To claim your blog using this method, you use the app to send a message to your friends asking them to confirm that "such-and-such.com" is, in fact, a blog owned and maintained by you. Ten friend confirmations later, and you're designed that blog's owner.

The Blog Directory

What's unique about the Blog Networks' blog directory is that it utilizes geographical location retrieved from Facebook's demographics to organize blogs. So, in addition to the "World Top 50" page, there are also separate pages to show the Top 50 blogs in the networks that you're a member of like, for example, Tampa Bay.

You can also browse for blogs in the directory where they are organized by tags and popularity. At the moment, the directory has about 8000 blogs and is growing by 150 new blogs per day. As I browsed through the technology category, I personally came across a slew of new blogs I had not been exposed to yet, so even for less-than-casual blog readers like us, there's a chance you'll find some of value in this app, too - new blogs.

The only drawback to the directory as far as I could tell, was the inability to filter out blogs in other languages, but often the titles would give them away, so you knew which ones were in your language.

The Feed Reader

The Blog Networks' feed reader is designed to be used by people who don't know what RSS is or what it means to subscribe to a feed. Instead, after joining five blog networks, the app automatically guesses the type of stories the user likes and this is displayed in a simple form on the home page. (And nowhere are the words "feed" or "RSS" used).

Each story is displayed one-at-a-time and you can click a "thumbs up" to vote for any story that you find interesting. If your friends have also voted for that story, you'll see their profile images below in an area where it says "Recent Thumbs Up." To continue reading more stories, you then simply click the "More News" button.

With Blog Networks, there's also no need to worry about your blog content being "stolen" to build this app or any conversation fragmentation taking place. The stories from the various blogs are not shown in full - to read the entire story or to leave a comment on the blog, you need to click through to the web site.

The "My Blogs" Feature

The app provides an easy way to put a visual blogroll on your Facebook profile to show off the blogs you read. When you use the app, going to the "My Blogs" page will show the blogs separated into two categories: "Blogs I Author" and "Blogs I Like."

As a blog author, you have a page set up just for your blog which you can invite people to join much in the same way that you would invite your friends to join any app. The page features a Wall for your blog and a "Selected Content" section which you can customize to show some of your best posts.

While in beta testing, the Blog Networks app will only be pulling your feed and your popularity data if you have 15 readers (for the feed) or 20 readers (for the popularity data). Based on how you tagged your blog upon sign-up, you'll also see a list of "Related Blogs" on this page, too.

Conclusion

Overall, the Blog Networks app shows a lot of potential for generating interest in blog reading beyond the core group of the technically savvy who rely on RSS readers like Google Reader or FeedDemon. Although still in beta, the app now has 8000 blogs listed and 20,000 installs to date.

Although MyBlogLog offers some similar features, their Facebook presence is limited to this product page and this group. This is where Blog Networks can fulfill a need. Plenty of people actually do read blogs, but they tend to stumble across them in Google searches, sign up for them via email subscriptions, or occasionally visit their favorites via the blog's URL. Now, they have another way to read: on Facebook.

Of course, the popular Facebook app Feedheads already provides this service in a way. However, the Blog Networks app goes beyond just sharing stories among friends and introduces a real community aspect. Besides, the Feedheads app with its Google Reader integration isn't exactly aimed at the casual blog reader, anyway.

If you want to add the Blog Networks app to your profile, the link is here.

In the future, the company plans to let people subscribe to topics the same way you can subscribe to communities. The aggregated information stream from subscribed topics will be presented in a new profile tab, "New in My World." You can check out some topics here: web 2.0, politics, lifestream. Some screenshots are below.

Demonstrated at the eTech conference today, m.mybloglog.com says it allows users to: "Bind your Bluetooth address to your MyBlogLog account and discover others nearby and [sic] find out if you have any shared interests. Meetspace keeps track of time spent with others so you have a running log of people to meet and things to talk about."

Reality Mining

"Reality mining" is a phrase coined by MIT researcher Sandy Pentland, whose work we wrote about in December. Pentland is working on processing more than 350,000 hours of data collected from peoples' cell phones. Pentland's Nokia funded work is studying proximity, location and activity data using information including interactions recorded between Bluetooth devices.

Previous coverage of what Pentland is up to is worth a read on its own. Obviously he's not the only one working on passive collection of presence and activity data through the interaction of mobile devices.

The Privacy Lab That is MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog is a great laboratory for Yahoo! to experiment with behavioral tracking and personal information among early adopter crowds. There's a lot of fascinating work being done there. It sometimes borders on creepy, though, and this is one of those times.

If you've signed up for a MyBlogLog account, you've probably experienced the ambivalent feelings that can arise from on one hand being interested to see the faces of other people who read your blog or the blogs you like, but on the other hand feeling a little uneasy with your own blog reading being very public. The MyBlogLog cookie is very persistent, too. Of course this is opt-in, but how far down the rabbit hole are we going to go before that's no longer sufficient justification for new levels of tracking?

Data portability and lifestreaming online have huge potential, but once experiments like this start creeping into reality mining territory there are some gigantic privacy questions that come up. I don't know why MyBlogLog thinks it can get away with introducing this kind of service when it knows it has a shaky public image on privacy.

My first thought upon seeing this was: the internet brain implant creeps closer every day. Maybe I'm over reacting, but how often do you see people who never take their Bluetooth headsets off? This kind of tracking needs to stay as far away from the inside of my head as possible.

I have said several times that Yahoo! is pushing the envelope on data portability with MyBlogLog while the standards community sits too far towards the sidelines having a different discussion. The web, and data portability itself, need a big discussion of the privacy half of the data portability discussion. To keep track of these important discussions here's an RSS feed you can subscribe to that contains DataPortability.org discussions that contain the word "privacy" and Ask.com blogsearch results for the query: privacy AND "data portability" OR authorization. Enjoy. Here's a preview of the last few things that have come through this feed.

Recent Items in Data Portability and Privacy Feed

Less than a week after a small investment in the ex-Googler founded FriendFeed put lifestreaming on a lot of peoples' maps - the entry of a Yahoo! property could be a game changer in a market full of startups.

MyBlogLog will be experimenting with different ping rates to refresh data from the other services and it isn't intended for minute-by-minute scanning, but for most people updates of their friends' activities every few hours will be more than sufficient.

Here's my profile page, if you'd like to be friends. I wish Ma.gnolia were a supported service, but more on MBL's shortcomings below.

[Story continued below screenshot]

MyBlogLog still has a ways to go before it can be as good a lifestreaming service as several others available, but it is becoming a more and more useful way to keep track of part of your community all the time.

The community view consists of the activities of people you have friended in MyBlogLog, and there's little prompting to add new friends. (Two weeks ago MyBlogLog did add XFN support, so there's certainly some standards based work going on there.) Every social app on the market, though, should look at how FriendFeed recommends friend additions, it's a very pleasing experience that's leading to really fast uptake this week.

Meanwhile, the MyBlogLog API is creeping closer to general public availability, the company says. Aggregate friend-streams, if you will (your friends' activities elsewhere in one feed), have been added to the API. When that API was first announced we said it was going to be a big deal. Tonight's overhaul of profile pages is just one more example of ways this service inside Yahoo! is quickly bringing to market technologies that a long list of startups still have behind closed beta walls. Up for sale or not, look out for the best parts of Yahoo!

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/lifestreaming_comes_to_yahoo.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/lifestreaming_comes_to_yahoo.php Products Thu, 28 Feb 2008 23:58:12 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick MyBlogLog is a powerful application for learning more about any blog's readership but with the release of an API last month, we knew this Yahoo! owned service was only going to get cooler. Kent Brewster at Yahoo! has hit a home run with BlogJuice, a javascript bookmarklet that uses MyBlogLog and YahooPipes to quickly display any information available on other sites about recent readers of a blog you're visiting.

I regularly check the MyBlogLog widget on a new blog I discover to see if I recognize the faces of other recent readers, as a way to get a feel for the site's community. BlogJuice takes that practice and amplifies its usefulness by orders of magnitude.

]]>Sponsor

]]> MyBlogLog lets users list their accounts on a variety of different services elsewhere and BlogJuice displays readers' job titles via LinkedIn, recent bookmarks on Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Digg, recent photos on Flickr, music on Last.fm and videos on YouTube. Clicking on a person's own blog in the display will show you the reader community for the blog they write. Wow.

I'm sure this is only the beginning of what can be done with MyBlogLog and I'm very excited to see what comes next. As I said when the MyBlogLog API launched, for all the good discussion around Data Portability, MyBlogLog is making things happen quickly. It's being done through proprietary technology, under the umbrella of one particular vendor, but damn is it hot.

It's not often that a tool comes along that I can imagine myself using every day. If BlogJuice holds up over time and traffic, this handy little service will join that list for me.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/blogjuice_learn_about_a_blogs.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/blogjuice_learn_about_a_blogs.php Products Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:10:57 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick If you could capture and use the names, ages, genders and demonstrated interests of the specific people who visited your website - would you? A whole lot of people providing services online would. While we've covered the movement for standards-based Data Portability a lot here lately, the newly announced MyBlogLog API is an alternative path to similar ends being taken by a proprietary company. Announced last week just before the Yahoo! OpenID announcement, the MyBlogLog API could end up being of even greater importance. Really.

]]>Sponsor

]]> The Significance of MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog is an incredible model of how to leverage human psychology in order to access peoples' data. The prospect of seeing the faces of people who visit your blog is so seductive that thousands if not millions of people have offered their faces and information to MyBlogLog in order to participate. Compare this to the staid pitch of OpenID, where the "utility" of single sign-on has been the most clearly articulated value proposition so far.

By acquiring this ingenious service, Yahoo! has gained access to the browsing history of scores of users and the traffic history of scores of websites. You can imagine the value to Google of offering Google Analytics? MyBlogLog is even better for Yahoo! The potential to spread the service is big; see the MyBlogLog implementation on the Yahoo! site People of the Web, for example.

The API

For now the MyBlogLog API is in private beta and only a select few developers have been given access. Two who have blogged about it so far include Aldon Hynes and Yahoo! employee Kent Brewster.

Developers will be able to use the API to access a variety of information about MyBlogUsers, including:

• User IDs for recent visitors to a site with MyBlogLog on it.


• Those users' contacts on MyBlogLog


• User IDs on other sites they've tied themselves to, like Twitter, Del.icio.us, Flickr and many, many more.

Once you've got access to that information, it should be relatively trivial to access another layer of information that includes:

• The ages, genders and locations for site visitors who have exposed that information to MyBlogLog


• The interests all around the web of visitors to a particular site, as exhibited by their tags on sites like Del.icio.us and Flickr


• The other sites commonly visited by said users.

Some additional layers of information may be inaccessible if Yahoo! actively shuts down access to data extraction tools, and much of the above may have been accessible already, in theory, using some of those same tools. It's hard to know yet what will be possible. Much of the above information is probably available for human eyes for premium account holders with MyBlogLog, too, but making it machine readable with an API is taking things to the next level.

Attention Data

I really like the idea of being able to leverage my Attention Data, the information that can be gleaned from my activities on various sites around the web. I'm hoping that the growth of the Data Portability Work Group will help move the proposed standard for Attention Data, APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) forward from the early stage it's at now.

Be that as it may, Attention is hard to explain and has only just begun to move forward in any kind of portable way. Enter the MyBlogLog API. I can opt-in to expose my activities around the web to MyBlogLog and then out to other sites that leverage the MyBlogLog API. There may be little reason to use APML if a website can offer personalized content based on a user's tags in Del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, etc. all via one easy to use service, MyBlogLog. It's not open and it's not as democratic as a distributed, portable, standards based approach would be - but it's also for better baked and will soon be ready to use.

MyBlogLog likes to play fast and loose with cookies, their feature that lets blog owners display MBL avatars for commenters for example is very cool. There's no reason to believe that in the coming months sites around the web with MyBlogLog installed won't automatically check to see if you are logged into MBL and offer you customized in-house content based on the tags used by you and your friends (as defined in MBL) on other sites around the web. One place to watch for mashups with MBL as they come up will be John Musser's ProgrammableWeb.

This is my prediction for the significance of both Yahoo! OpenID and the MyBlogLog API: OpenID won't catch fire with mainstream web users but Yahoo! (Open) ID may and Attention Data may never be free or widely understood but the use of MyBlogLog to broker our data could catch on very easily. To be honest I hope that's not the way it goes down but it is going to be very interesting to see. I've said it before and I'll say it again: however much money Yahoo! paid for MyBlogLog, it was money well spent. Yahoo! is positioning itself to become an even bigger broker for identity and Attention around the web than it already is.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myblog_api.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myblog_api.php Analysis Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:29:39 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick