Faves.com Blog

Faves is back up

2008-05-27T14:34:00.000-07:00

We got the site up sooner than expected - so everything should be working again. We are still recovering a back-up database server, but this should not effect your experience on the primary web site.

If you're still having problems, feel free to email feedback@faves.com so we can look into it.

Faves is down

2008-05-27T14:15:00.001-07:00

We had a failure in our data center today which has caused Faves.com to be unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope to have the site back up in a few hours. We'll post more information here after we have recovered.

New way to post Feedback

2008-04-09T19:06:00.000-07:00

We just noticed a really cool site called GetSatisfaction. It's a customer-focused feedback site where users of any product or service can interact with the company that makes it to ask questions, register complaints, or offer suggestions. Looks like a great idea, and quite well done.

So, give it a try if you have feedback for us at Faves.com!

Two Million Page Views per Month

2007-11-09T20:31:00.000-08:00

We've had strong user growth since August, the last time I reported our monthly page views. It's continued through to our re-launch as Faves.com this week. I'm happy to announce that we've doubled the number of visitors and page views in the last three months.

Monthly visitors: 1 million
Monthly page views: 2 million

Since we launched in June 2006, we've always attracted a strong international audience (despite having an all English interface). Here's the breakdown of monthly visits by country:

375,000 - United States
150,000 - Italy (!)
100,000 - Japan
75,000 - India
75,000 - United Kingdom
50,000 - Germany
50,000 - Canada
25,000 - Malaysia
25,000 - China

BlueDot.us is now Faves.com!

2007-11-07T00:56:00.000-08:00

We have some big changes to report at Blue Dot. The most obvious, is that we've changed our name to Faves.com.

FAQ:

Why did you change your name?

Many users are confused by a .us domain name - so we decided it was time we changed to a more mainstream .com domain.

Do I have to create a new account?

No. You can use the same user name (or email address) and password that you used on BlueDot.us, to sign in to Faves.com.

Will I lose any of my data or settings?

We have preserved all your bookmarks (now called "Faves") on our new web site. You also still have all the same friend relationships, messages, etc. Everything is preserved.

Will my toolbar buttons still work?

Yes. There is nothing you need to do to update your browser toolbar buttons - they will work fine with Faves.com. But, if you want to update to the latest version (with icons that match our new site logo), just visit our toolbar installation page to get the latest version.

What's New at Faves.com?

Besides a name change, we've also been working on a major release with lots of great new features:

Topic Subscriptions. In addition to seeing bookmarks from your friends, you can now subscribe to topics on Faves.com to see all the newest content about the topics you care about.
Personalized Home Page. This new page shows you all the most popular Faves from your subscriptions. We also keep track of any Faves you've seen before, so you see only fresh Faves when you click the "unread" button.
Voting. In addition to commenting on bookmarks, you can now vote them up or down. By clicking the up arrow, you'll help Faves.com identify the best bookmarks for each topic (you can always find Faves you've voted on by visiting your personal Faves page and clicking the Votes tab - so it's a good way to remember the stuff you like).

We hope you like this latest revision of Faves.com. If you have questions or suggestions for ways to improve our service, please feel free to reply to this mail or send them to us at feedback@faves.com.

Images are Back

2007-10-10T20:03:00.001-07:00

To follow up on our previous post, we have recovered all the missing images.

For the technical folks out there, here are the steps that worked. After determining our files were striped across three drives in a RAID 5 array, we plugged two of these drives into our 3Ware RAID controller. We then used Raid Reconstructor to create a virtual disk image. Finally, we were able to access the files from this virtual disk image using GetDataBack.

Images Missing | Day 2

2007-09-12T12:35:00.000-07:00

Here's an update on our hardware failure yesterday. The short answer is that we're still in the middle of recovering the images, but it's taking longer than expected. New dot images are displaying properly, but the older dots are still missing their thumbnails.

One lesson for us is that a) you can't have too many backup strategies, and b) you should test your backup processes to make sure they work.

The machine that failed in our data center was the master for our thumbnail images. This includes user profile images as well. We used to have a partial backup of these images, but we lost that machine in a separate failure earlier this year.

While we have extensive backup systems in place for user and dot databases, we rationalized that a) this machine has dual drives (a Raid1 disk array) and b) the images are recoverable from the Internet (since this is "just a thumbnail cache"). But we didn't correctly reason that we also have the one and only copy of our user profile pictures stored on this same machine. It's a fairly large dataset with about 1 million images (30+ GB).

We did not have a current backup for this data. Since the machine died, we've been wrestling with migrating the disks to another machine. Part of our trouble is due to inexperience in dealing with the vagaries of how our hardware Raid controller works. It also involved some high-speed runs to Fry's electronics for some needed parts.

We're currently combining several recovery strategies: restoring data from an image backup we made in January, re-thumbnailing images directly from their original Internet locations and using a data recovery tool to recover files from our Raid1 drives. We also finally got a hold of AMCC (manufacturers of our 3Ware Raid controller) today and better understand how to migrate the drives (BTW - I rate their product support as excellent - their support engineer was very knowledgeable and helpful).

Again, I'll update you tomorrow on our progress. Thanks again for your patience and we apologize for any inconvenience this partial site outage is causing you.

Images Missing Today

2007-09-11T10:39:00.000-07:00

We had a hardware failure overnight in our data center that is affecting our thumbnail images. We are working now to replace the failed hardware and hope to have everything back up an running later today.

In the meantime, everything else on the service is working properly. You will not lose any information from any of your dots, and the image thumbnails for new dots will be generated when we bring the hardware up again.

We're really sorry for this service interruption. Thanks for your patience.

Dots vs. Facebook's "Posted Items"

2007-08-20T14:32:00.001-07:00

A common question I get asked is why someone should use Blue Dot for bookmarking when Facebook has a "Posted Items" feature. Great question! Well, it comes down to Blue Dot really being all about bookmarks -- saving, sharing, discussing, searching, and discovering them. Here are my top reasons. Feel free to add a comment with yours.

Search. You can search your own Dots, your friends' Dots, or everyone's Dots. For example, find a last minute restaurant recommendation by searching your own or your friends' Dots for a restaurant. Or, if you are on the road, do the same in our mobile version.

Organization. You can tag your Dots with different words like "funny" or "restaurant".

That makes it easy to browse your Dots by topic. You can see the topics I Dot about the most at http://bluedot.us/users/mohit/tags.

Also, since you automatically get a page for each tag, it's a great way to share certain Dots with certain people. I tag Dots my investment club might find useful with the tag "investment club" and then share the page with my fellow members.

Privacy. Finally, you can choose to share your Dot with everyone, certain friends, or just for yourself. For example, use Blue Dot for private research by creating Dots that only you can see.

1 Million Page Views | What are they doing?

2007-08-06T11:59:00.001-07:00

Blue Dot has just hit the 1 Million page view per month mark. I thought it would be interesting to share where Blue Dot users are spending their time. I particularly want to thank the avid fans and friends of Blue Dot, that have been contributing so many interesting and useful web sites to the Blue Dot database over the past year.

First of all, the total time spent on Blue Dot is pretty amazing. We believe people spend 1.5 minutes on each page on average, so we're getting over 25,000 hours of user attention per month. If people value their time at $10/hour, they're investing over $3M per year just in using Blue Dot.

Since a large portion of our traffic is coming from search engines (about 75%), the "average user" is not someone who is a regular user, creating their own dots. Rather, they are browsing and reading the dots created by our regular user base.

When we created Blue Dot Buzz, we thought the majority of search traffic would be directed there. That's not at all what's happening. Most search traffic is landing on the individual profile pages of our users. In fact, over 60% of our total page views are spent looking in user profiles. Of those, 10% of time people are looking at a top level user profile, with the remaining page views split evenly between viewing a profile restricted to an individual tag (e.g. http://bluedot.us/users/mike/tag/travel), and individual Dot "permalink" pages (e.g. 144 Places I've Slept in the World).

Surprisingly, less than 5% of our traffic is to our "Front Page" summary of today's dots. But about 10% of our page views go to "Buzz" pages where people are finding the most recently popular Dots about a particular category (e.g., http://bluedot.us/buzz/movies).

Is the future of Social Networking Free and Open?

2007-08-06T09:43:00.000-07:00

Can an open platform/protocol be the ultimate winner in the evolution of social networking? I've been arguing that that is just what will/should happen. But, I've gotten some strong arguments to the contrary.

On the one hand, the most successful open communication protocol in the world, SMTP, has allowed billions of people to communicate openly and freely. There is no master gateway through which email must be sent. This is the model I think future social networks should have.

I spoke with a Google engineer about an open social networking protocol, and his response was, "why hasn't it worked for Instant Messaging". Google has tried to make nice with the likes of Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, but we still have these walled gardens, so that two people have to belong to the same monolithic IM platform in order to communicate. There have been some small attempts to form special inter-operating agreements between specific IM providers, but we still have no purely open, and universal standard for IM communication.

Facebook is the first large scale social network to make an attempt at creating an open platform. Yet they are going too slow for many developers; there still exist restrictions on what you can do with the information you extract from the Facebook API, regardless of whether your users opt-in. And Facebook can unilaterally shut off any third party service provider, even if they have a devoted user base on Facebook that wants to use their application.

I also don't think you can cobble together the integrated social experience of Facebook with free and open services that exist out there today (as suggested by this Wired article). What we need is a set of platform protocols that follow these principles:

The user is the owner of all his information. His friend list, his content, his interactions.
No social service should lock up a user so that he cannot switch to another social network provider, bringing all his information with him.
No social service should refuse to work any other service (with some exceptions for spam-like behavior).
Users should be able to opt-in to not only let their friends have access to their personal information and content, but also to allow third-party social service providers have access to their information and content.

The protocols we need go beyond simple micro-formats suggested for representing friend relationships, like XFN. We need real communication protocols to pass data back and forth between social services. The protocols need to have knowledge of user identity and should enable viewing and sending information based on permissions that users' have specified for their own accounts.

Portable identity system (identify a user, independent of the service provider).
Standardized information schema into which personal information, photos, bookmarks, friend lists, groups, communities, presence, and current status, can all be fit.
Protocol for querying and caching this information between services and third/party applications.
Mechanism for revoking permissions so that all previously cached data must be redacted.
Protocol for sending messages between users; either real time, or queued.

If such a distributed system existed, MySpace and Facebook could become just another (albeit the largest) social service provider, but without the monopoly-like control to lock up and control our interactions with friends and companies of our choosing.

How do I rank?

2007-08-02T19:06:00.001-07:00

Every time you create a public Dot, it has a chance to be displayed on a "Blue Dot Buzz" page for each of the topics (tags) you've added to your Dot. Not only that, but if you create popular dots for that topic frequently, you will become a Featured Dotter for that topic. If you go to any "Buzz" page about a topic, we will show you "Featured Dotters" in the right hand column. For example, if you go to:

http://bluedot.us/buzz/travel

you'll see six Blue Dot users listed, along with a score beneath their names. These are the people we've identified as having the most popular dots for the travel topic.

What's a Score and how can you be featured on a Buzz page?

We use an algorithm that calculates a score based on a) the number of dots that a user creates for this topic, b) the number of times that people click through their dots to read the linked-to web page.

To become a Featured Dotter, I'd suggest following these steps:

Create Dots about this things you care about. Being the first to Dot a particular URL will give you a chance to have your dot shown on the Buzz page. Remember to consistently use the "tag" for the topic you're dotting for (e.g., "travel").
Edit your comments and title in such a way that people will want to click on the dot to read the underlying page. Tell your readers something useful about the page and why it is interesting or important.
Having friends on Blue Dot gives your Dot a way to be seen by people who are close to you, and will be interested in your Dot because YOU are interested in it. The more people click on your dot, the more likely it will be promoted to show up on the Buzz page for that topic. You might want to send a Friend request to other Blue Dot users, or current Featured Dotters for the topics you're interesting in.

P.S. For the geeks out there, the topic score (or "karma") formula for ranking Featured Dotters is approximately:

log(number_of_dots_in_topic) + log(views_of_your_dots_in_topic) + overall_bluedot_karma

Facebook Developer Garage Seattle

2007-07-31T21:38:00.000-07:00

Mohit, Tosh, and I attended the Facebook Developer Garage meeting tonight. It's amazing how much buzz has been created around building Facebook applications. Seattle-based iLike is one of the biggest applications on Facebook. The meeting was organized by Adam Loving, who has built a social currency application called Zuckerbucks. About 150 of us were packed into the Capital Hill Arts Center (fire code violation?). Facebook sent four representatives us to Seattle to meet with us. Presenting were Dave Morin and Meagan Marks (user id=7051).

Some of the tidbits they tossed out at the meeting:

Facebook is now at 33 million active users, adding 100,000 users PER DAY and generates 80 million page views PER DAY.
The largest 3rd party Facebook application has 10 million users (30% penetration!) - iLike?
There are 80,000 developers signed up to build applications (there are currently 2,200 active applications on Facebook).
By the end of the year, they project 75% of the user base will be out of college (they just passed the 50% mark).

We're, of course, looking at creating a version of Blue Dot for Facebook. It would be great to offer the Blue Dot features (tagging, searching, aggregated view of friends Dots, Buzz) to Facebook users since they would get all the benefits of having a pre-built community of friends, without having to recreate that just to use Blue Dot.

We still have some technical details to work out; in particular, we'd like NOT to partition the community into Facebook vs. Blue Dot Classic user pools. But Facebook's terms of service do not permit exposing a user's friends outside of the Facebook application. So, it may require that users do some sort of dual account creation; which would not be great. We certainly want to be able to import any current Blue Dot user's dots into their Facebook application.

If you're on Facebook now, you can actually use the feed feature of the Notes application to expose Dots in your mini-feed on your profile. Join our Blue Dot Users on Facebook group to find out more (and let us know you're there).

The Naked Truth in Seattle

2007-07-25T08:46:00.000-07:00

I went to The Naked Truth panel discussion last night. Targeted at Seattle technology startup entrepreneurs, the event was hosted by Madrona and RedFin and featured 5 members of the press on a Q&A panel:

Rebecca Buckman, The Wall Street Journal
Freg Vogelstein, Wired Magazine
Michael Arrington, TechCrunch
John Cook, Seattle PI (blog post)
Tricia Duryee, Seattle Times

There were about 250 people who attended, and the guest list filled up very quickly (it was all opt-in via Wiki edits on a wetpaint site!). To show how a fairly large event can be done creatively, and on the cheap, this thing was actually held in the parking lot of the Havana Social Club. Madrona and RedFin popped for drinks and Armadillo Barbeque. The weather was gorgeous too, so it didn't feel like a cheap event - it was really very nice.

Gregg Gottesman from Madrona had a bunch of prepared questions - which were generally quite good, though I would have preferred that the audience would have had more time to ask questions directly. You do get the feeling that a lot of these entrepreneurs are really nervous about getting good press and PR. Are these folks really as powerful as we make them out to be?

Granted, it can be a very effective way to reach a lot of potential customers (partners, and investors) by getting good press coverage. But it seems that the tail is wagging the dog the way many people seem to put so much stake in what these folks will write about them.

I did get to talk to Michael Arrington and John Cook, both of whom have written about Blue Dot over the last year; it was great to meet them in person - and their coverage has been a big help to us in getting the word out.

I also really enjoyed chatting with some of my fellow entrepreneurs at the after party, and sharing stories about the things we're working on and how things are going:

Marcelo Calbucci (blog) - Sampa.com - Family web sites
Shawn Plaster - goChongo.com - Online video contests
Nathan Kaiser - nPost.com - Startup networking
Josh Hug - shelfari.com - social book recommendations
Hans Omli - shoestringventures.com and enteringstartup.com - web 2.0 incubator
Deepak Singh - bbgm - business/bytes/genes/molecules - biotech blog
Krishnan Subramanian - krishworld.com - open source guru

It's great to see a vibrant startup community in Seattle - not everything is dominated by Microsoft/Google/Amazon/Real.

Blue Dot April Newsletter - Making Friends

2007-04-13T14:33:00.001-07:00

Our user base continues to grow each month, but I've notice that many of our users are not connected to Friends on Blue Dot. I think that's such a shame. For as nice as Blue Dot is for saving and recalling your own bookmarks, I know I get so much more out of it because it connects me to other people.

So I thought I'd share with you:

Top 5 Reasons Blue Dot is Better with Friends
Effective Ways to Build Your Blue Dot Community

Top 5 Reasons Blue Dot is Better with Friends

Keeping in touch with old Friends

When I first got involved with Blue Dot, I invited a couple of my best friends from high-school. Since we are in different parts of the country, and life is busy, we had almost lost track of each other. It's hard to find an excuse to send email, call, or visit. But we still have a lot in common and want to stay in touch.

Now that we use Blue Dot, I get a chance to follow along with things they're Dotting. I also tend to write comments in my Dots, with my friends in mind. Not only do I record what I want to remember about a site - but I try to write something I think my friends would find interesting.

Occasionally, we have conversations using the Blue Dot "Add Comment" feature (which is ONLY accessible to you and your friends - no spam here!).

Tapping the experts

I'm a career software developer, but there are always new things to learn about in our industry. So, I try to pick Friends that are experts in areas I'm just learning about. I ask them to "Dot" their favorite resources on the topic. And, when I find something I don't quite understand, I can Dot about it on Blue Dot. More often than not, one of my Friends sees my post and gives me the extra bit of advice I need to get un-stuck.

When I am looking for information, I search my Friend's Dots and I usually find a great recommendation - even if the Dot was created many months before I needed it.

Team research (secret or otherwise)

If you work in a team that wants to keep up with and share the latest developments in your field, or share competitive research, Blue Dot is an easy way to do that. And, if you all agree to use a common tag, you'll be able to see all your Dots grouped together. For example, we use the tag "bdmentions" to share all the blog posts and news articles that we find on the web.

Learn how to create a private Friend List if you only want a subset of your friends to see some of your Dots.

Planned serendipity

Planned Serendipity is something we didn't expect, but that happens all the time to those of us with a lot of Friends on Blue. Someone will Dot about an upcoming event (e.g., a Demetri Martin concert in Seattle) if they think some of their friends might be interested in going. Blue Dot comments make a great way to organize a group to go on impromptu hikes, weekend camping trips, or even just beer-nights.

Bored? What are your Friends sharing?

When you have a few minutes to burn during the day, most people go to a popular internet news site. You may find something interesting to read, but it won't be very unique to you and your friends. Since I have many Blue Dot Friends scouring the web each day, each dotting their own idiosyncratic sites, I get to read more eclectic and sometimes more interesting stuff by browsing my Friend's Dots.

Effective Ways to Build Your Blue Dot Community

We recognize that it can be hard to get your friends to join Blue Dot. People generally don't have time, they don't see the value is saving their bookmarks online, or they don't think they have anything to share.

On the other hand, once they try it, many feel that they can't imagine going back to surfing the Internet without Blue Dot. Here are some ideas to help you build your community:

Invite people who have an interest in YOU. If you're just out of school, invite some of your friends that no longer live in the same city. You can invite them one at a time, or many at once using our address book importer.

Share something of interest to them. The most effective way to get people interested is to send them something that you've already shared on Blue Dot.

When you create a Dot, click the "Add Friends by Email" at the bottom of the Blue Dot window.

Click the Share button on any of your Dots, and either pick Email This, or send them the address of the Permalink page.

Send many related Dots at once. You can send a link to all your Dots on a specific topic. Just go to My Dots, and click the topic tag in any of your Dots. For example, I'm interested in Space, so I could send my friends this link: http://bluedot.us/users/mike/tag/space.

Put a link to your Blue Dot profile in your email signature. At the end of every email I send, I add the signature block:

Mike Koss
Blue Dot - Head Cheerleader
http://bluedot.us/users/mike/tags

That way, if people want to find out more about me, they can go right to my profile and see a quick summary of the stuff I'm interested in.

Don't give up. If you're friends don't respond at first, follow up with a personal email or phone call. Many times people are busy - and getting a message from a company they don't know won't get their attention like a direct call from you would.

Good luck! I hope these tips were helpful. Let me know if you have any success stories you'd like to share with me - and above all - I hope you have fun using Blue Dot with your Friends.

If you have questions or suggestions for ways to improve our service, please feel free to reply to this mail or send them to us at feedback@bluedot.us.

Mike Koss
Head Cheerleader, BlueDot.Us

Blue Dot releases features for Bloggers and Video Viewing and More

2007-03-16T18:01:00.000-07:00

We've been rolling out some new features over the last couple of weeks. In case you hadn't noticed, I'd like to highlight a few for you:

Full Size Video Player - You can now watch full sized videos without leaving Blue Dot. Just click on the player image of the dot you want to view, and a player will automatically pop up.
Save to Favorites - Many users have asked for a light weight way to remember their friends dots, or highlight their favorite dots. Just click on the Save to Favorites link, and it's immediately added to your favorites list. All your favorites are displayed on your user profile (My Dots page) in the right column. Click View All to see a whole page of your favorite Dots.
View Counts - Want to know how many times people are clicking on the Dot you create? We now show you at the bottom of each dot (Viewed: N times). Your dot is seen many more times than this, but this tells you how often people wanted to click through to see the original web site (or how many times the video is played).
More Buzz - You'll notice widgets at the bottom of your home page that show you popular content from other users on Blue Dot that is related to the recent Dots you and your friends have created. It's a great way to find popular content from the whole Blue Dot community - so remember to scroll to the bottom of the page once in a while to take a look.
Yet More Buzz - Blue Dot is unique in creating a page of all the popular dots about virtually any topic. We've created a comprehensive directory of all the most popular Buzz pages at http://bluedot.us/YetMore.aspx. (or just click on See All Topics... and the bottom of the More... page).
Auto-Blogging - Many of us use Blue Dot as an easier way to blog about topics we care about. We've created an experimental feature that will post your Dots back to your blog each night. See some samples at My Blog and The Puget News. You can try this out for yourself by visiting our Auto Blogging page (we support Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress, and Moveable Type).

Export your Dots

2007-03-14T23:06:00.000-07:00

Many of our users have asked for a way to export their dots so they can:

a) Backup their data.
b) Feel comfortable that they are not locked-in to Blue Dot while they are in "trial" mode.
c) Can take their data to other bookmarking services.

We've implemented an export feature so you can now get all your dots downloaded into a single file. We use the standard browser Bookmark File format (supported in IE and Firefox, e.g.). You can use this file to read your Dots offline (it's just an HTML/Web page you can save on your local machine), or import this file to other bookmarking services (including del.icio.us).

To find the export tool, just click the Tools link at the top of the page, and look for "Export Dots". Here's a direct link:

http://bluedot.us/ExportBookmarks.aspx

Of course, you can also import this same file format to get started with Blue Dot by bringing any links you have created in your browser (or exported from another Bookmarking service).

http://bluedot.us/ImportBookmarks.aspx

As usual, please let us know how this works for you or if you have suggestions or problems by posting to our feedback page.

Blue Dot Smack - Shopping Event

2007-02-22T16:42:00.000-08:00

For many of our users, shopping is a serious business. But it can also be fun! Blue Dot has partnered with Jellyfish.com to bring you Smack Shopping, tailored specifically for Blue Dot users.

We've chosen some of the most popular products from Blue Dot users' wishlists. You'll have the opportunity to buy these products and receive a cash-back discount. While each item is for sale, the price will continuously drop. The longer you wait to buy, the more you'll save.

But there is a limited quantity available. Wait too long, and the other shoppers will get a great deal leaving you with nothing!

Some example products and cash-back savings from recent Smack Shopping events:

80GB Video iPod - 41% off
Canon Powershot Digital Camera - 50% off
XBox 360 - 46% off
TiVo Series 3 HD DVR - 23% off

Shoppers also have a chance to win free prizes, like a Nintendo Wii! I'll be online to host this unique real-time shopping event, so please stop by and chat. It should be a lot of fun!

When: Tuesday, March 6th, 1 PM Pacific Time (3 PM Central)
Where: www.jellyfish.com/smack/bluedot

We invite you to go to JellyFish.com to register today. While you're there you can browse their online merchants to find products you'd like to be included. If you find something you like, just "dot it" using the tag "wishlist" by March 4th. We'll try to include as many items selected by our users as we can.

New Privacy Settings - By User Request

2007-02-06T18:12:00.000-08:00

We just implemented a couple features that our users have been asking us for.

Privacy Settings - If you're freaked out by seeing your Blue Dot profile show up when you Google your name, just click the "Prevent search engines from indexing my profile" button on our Privacy Settings page. Within a few weeks, Google should remove any reference to your profile page on Blue Dot.
Best of Buzz Pages - We have added a new feature to Blue Dot Buzz - a "Best" category. This is a great way to see what our users have found to be the most interesting content about any topic (not just what is recently found).

Enjoy! Please lets us know if there are other things we can do to make Blue Dot more useful and fun for you and your friends.

Blue Dot Announces Blue Dot Buzz!

2007-01-22T12:00:00.000-08:00

We're excited to announce a new service for Blue Dot users - Blue Dot Buzz. Most of our users love sharing their bookmarks with their friends, family, and co-workers. But we didn't previously have a very good way to see what the whole community of Blue Dot users is finding on the web. That's why we created Blue Dot Buzz.

Front Page: Our Front Page now has a great summary of what people are finding today on the internet across a variety of the most popular topics. We also have a tag cloud that shows the most popular topics that people are saving dots about in the last 24 hours.
Topic based Buzz Pages: Our new Buzz Pages record the most popular dots about almost any topic. You can come back each day, and find new content that is being recommended by the Blue Dot community. Here are some examples:

See what others are saying. Whenever you dot something, we'll now show you who else has dotted the same thing. Whenever you see one of your own or a friend's dot, look for the text (and N others) after the user name. You can click on that to see our new URL Detail page to see a summary of what everyone on Blue Dot has to say about that link.
In-line Video Players: Many of our users are dotting their favorite videos from YouTube, Google Video, and Metacafe. We've incorporated an in-line video player so you can preview those videos without having to leave the site. I think you'll find it's a great way to quickly see what your friends are sharing - and you can always click on the title of the dot to take you to the full-size original video.

As always, we'd love to hear what you think. Leave your comments here, or send us direct feedback.

BlueDot.Us Going Down for Site Upgrade

2007-01-22T11:56:00.000-08:00

We're doing a major site upgrade tonight. Sorry for the service interruption. We plan to have the site back up shortly.

Feel free to check back in a couple of hours - we'll have some exciting new features to show you!

Dot Your Feeds

2006-12-28T13:19:00.000-08:00

Here's a tip for our news junkies out there. I've recently been playing with Google's RSS Reader. They've implemented a really fast online feed reader that's a great way to skim through the RSS feeds you subscribe to. They also have a sharing feature that creates a web page (My Shared Page) and an associated RSS feed of all the stories you want to "share".

Here's where Blue Dot comes in. I have set up the Auto-Dotting from My Blog feature of Blue Dot, to automatically scan the shared items I've read in Google reader, and create corresponding dots. That way, my friends on Blue Dot can see (and comment) on what I'm reading. Click here to see what my Google Reader items look like in Blue Dot.

Here's how to set up Google Reader to share your favorite feeds on Blue Dot:

Create a Google Reader account if you don't already have one.
Subscribe to your favorite news feeds (Google offers some suggestions if you don't already have some).
When you read a story you want to share, click the "Share" button at the bottom of the article (alternately, just type SHIFT-S, to use the keyboard shortcut).
Click on "Shared Items" in the left hand column. You should see your stories listed here.
Click on the "a feed" link and copy the text from your browser's Address bar (it will look something like: http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/09892608792699866194/state/com.google/broadcast
Log in to Blue Dot and go to your Auto-Dotting page (Tools/Auto Dot From My Blog).
Choose "Custom Feed" and paste the above link into the URL field.
I use the tag "fromrss" to identify my Google Reader dots.
Click Configure Blog.

Whew! That's it. You should notice your new shared dots created in your account within 30 minutes. Blue Dot periodically will check your Google Reader account to see if you've shared anything new.

Send me (mike) a message on Blue Dot if you set this up in your account or if you have any problems.

Check our our new Blue Dot Wiki

2006-12-11T17:02:00.000-08:00

We've started a Wiki site (hosted by our friends at Wet Paint). We'll be answering frequently asked questions, provide tips and tricks about some of our more advanced (hidden) features. As fans of Blue Dot we hope you'll check it out, and even contribute to the Wiki to help make Blue Dot a better experience for everyone.

Blue Dot Wiki
Blue Dot FAQ

Blue Dot hard to reach?

2006-12-01T17:46:00.000-08:00

Some of our users have reported that they are having trouble getting to Blue Dot today. We believe that this is/was because of a problem with the Internet DNS (name) servers. We have taken steps to resolve the problem, but due to the nature of DNS, our fix may take some time to propagate to all user's computers. Please bear with us if you are having trouble getting to bluedot.us during the next 24 hours. We're sorry for the inconvenience.

Web Toolkit for the Savvy Web User by Seattle MindCampers

2006-11-14T17:30:00.000-08:00

We had a great time at MindCamp this year. MindCamp is an "unconference". Which means that nobody knows what we're going to be doing until we get there. Everyone has a chance to propose a session topic, and people vote with their feet on the sessions they're interested in. For the next 24 hours, "stuff happens".

Blue Dot hosted a session to see what people are using in their personal "web toolkit". We know that, as a Web 2.0 company, we're competing with lots of tools and services for mind-share. We were curious to know what kinds of things people have adopted and have incorporated into their regular routine.

Our session was really fun. I was on stage facilitating, but every web site we talked about was proposed by an audience member. Kabir and Jigna manned the control booth, dotting the sites as we named them where they would show up on the screen behind me. I was really blown away by the knowledge and breadth of services that this audience is using; it's obvious that MindCamp really attracts the über-geeks in the Seattle community. If you want to see what mainstream and leading-edge services MindCampers are using, you can see all the sites we dotted here: Web Toolkit on Blue Dot.

If you were at MindCamp and want to add to the above list, just log in to Blue Dot and create a dot for your site using the tag "mindcamp".