Monday, March 31, 2008

Yes, MyBlogLog is Still There

The way that we've all been talking about FriendFeed, you'd think that they were the only game in town. Ian Kennedy (a/k/a everwas) of MyBlogLog hopes to counter that belief, and takes the time to draw some distinctions between MyBlogLog and that other service:

New with Me - MBL’s version of lifestreaming. Our approach is different because we designed around driving the conversation back to the source. We do not capture comments and force people to mybloglog.com to view any comments about updates streaming across our servers. Our focus is on (a) letting you know what other services your contacts on MyBlogLog have so you can connect with them there and, (b) harvesting meta-data on lifestream events which we use to slice the content in interesting ways. We also do not collect any private data so no anti-pattern asking for your password is required.

In other words, "we don't contribute to conversations fragmentation" and "we don't pose a security risk." Unfortunately, the current implementation appears to be a little buggy, or at least it requires some setting up. On my New With Me page at my MyBlogLog page, entries showing up under "Oemperor Twitter" are actually entries from some of my friends, and not necessarily from myself. However, my regular Twitter feed seems to be OK (although I'm not seeing all my tweets, but that could be a Twitter problem).

Another thing that Ian mentioned was topics:

Topics - with all the great content flowing across our New with Me servers, it was time to organize it in a way that is useful outside of the context of the MyBlogLog social network. Because we harvest the tags and other meta-data associated with the New with Me updates, we organize these updates into dynamic topic pages that feature the latest news on any tag. If Wikipedia is a relatively stable set of authoritative links around a certain topic, we aim to be the dynamic equivalent - featuring the latest updates from our members around those topics.

MyBlogLog has had tagging ever since I joined the service, so it makes sense that Ian would tout this as a feature. This may merit some monitoring, especially when people start using the openworld08 tag again (here's MyBlogLog's page for openworld08).

However, MyBlogLog has certainly done some sprucing up over the last few weeks, and it merits a visit if you haven't been there lately.

[mrontemp business] | [mrontemp politics] | [mrontemp technology] | [mrontemp del.icio.us tags]

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the post.

The RSS feed MyBlogLog picks up for http://twitter.com/oemperor is your combined feed for you and your friends which is why you see their tweets come in on your New with Me page.

If you've got your twitter ID entered in the services area of your MyBlogLog profile (as you do) that should be enough to capture a feed of just your tweets alone.

We're aware that some tweets are dropped and are working on our extractors to make this better. Stay tuned!

Ian

Ontario Emperor said...

Ian, thanks for the clarification.