Faves.com Blog

Faves will be Back up Soon!

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 18:44:00 +0000

Good news! Faves will be returning shortly under new management. The details are being worked out and another announcement will likely come early next week. But in the mean time we're working to bring Faves back online very shortly.

Thanks to all that emailed us asking about getting their Faves bookmark data back. We're working to get you access to your full Faves account.

Mike Koss

Faves.com is now offline

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Tue, 24 May 2011 20:50:00 +0000

We temporarily pulled the plug on Faves.com today - we are actively looking for a buyer for the site from someone who would want to continue to offer the service to our users. If you're interested in acquiring faves.com, please contact me at mike@faves.com.

I want to thank all of our users on this journey - I'm sorry we didn't end up with a viable business after 6 years working on this.

You can read more about the journey of Faves at the excellent GeekWire post about Faves.com.

- Mike

Faves.com is shutting down

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Wed, 18 May 2011 19:23:00 +0000

We're shutting down the Faves.com service within a matter of days. If you want to export your data, please visit:

http://faves.com/exportbookmarks.aspx

Unfortunately, we were not able to sustain the costs of operating Faves.com from our current revenue sources.

We will be selling the remaining assets of the company shortly. If you're interested in bidding on our domain name(s), send a query to mike@faves.com.

Thanks,

Mike Koss

CEO, Blue Dot Inc.

Planned Site Outage Today

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 21:26:00 +0000

We're doing some site maintenance today. Please bear with us as we are upgrading some of our infrastructure.

Update: As of Friday, Nov 5th, we have been resolving several issues with our new servers. Faves.com may be unavailable throughout the day as we work through the remaining problems. If you have difficulty signing in, or using the service, please send us mail at support@faves.com to let us know.

Thanks! Mike and Lee

Spammers Be Gone!

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:50:00 +0000

The fight against spam on Faves is never ending. As we've scaled back on full time staff, it has been increasingly hard to keep up with users who are trying use Faves purely for SEO (despite the fact that our links are all no-follow!), spam, or distribute or adult content.

This has been particularly harsh on our Buzz system - showing the most popular bookmarks for literally thousands of tags (keywords).

This week we took the drastic step to hand-pick the users who's content will be allowed to be posted to our front page and popular Buzz pages like our Video page.

The results have been remarkable. What used to be a wasteland of spam (or worse, porn), now actually has some interesting content on it again.

We'll be continuing to refine this, but hope that the recommendations you see from Faves will be much higher quality.

If you'd like your account to be considered to be included in our recommendation service, follow our Twitter account and send us a link to your faves user page for review.

Ma.gnolia Data Loss and Faves.com Future

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 18:59:00 +0000

I've been watching the data loss at ma.gnolia.com with some interest. Ma.gnolia is (was) a social bookmarking web site, with a small, but engaged community of users. Amongst the social bookmarking websites, we felt it was one of the stronger competitors with Faves.com (bluedot.us).

But, on Jan 31, 2009, they had a catastrophic data loss and the site went down. At first, it looked like they would recover in a few hours. Hours dragged on into days, and days into weeks. Even now, some 3 months later, they have not returned. They did provide some data recovery tools to their users to try to reclaim their bookmarks from publicly available copies on the web.

I just finished watching this video interview of Larry Halff, the creator behind ma.golia. At first, I thought they were being a bit flippant about losing the all their users's data, but Larry proved to be very forthcoming and contrite about the episode.

The interesting facts and insights from this video are:

They lost 1/2 Terabyte of data.
They did not test their backup system.
They had only one backup (not a rolling backup).
They ignored operational issues/performance as site grew.
Ma.gnolia was running on 4 mac mini's running as web servers with 1 main database server and 1 backup server
Despite using software raid storage, file system corruption caused catastrophic data loss and prevented their backup from working.
Mag.nolia "never made money" (completely self funded), but did build a loyal community of users.
Larry feels that "destination social bookmarking" does not have a good prognosis - more people are using the large social sites (Facebook, Twitter) for sharing links.
Ma.gnolia will return hosted on AWS (cloud infrastructure) with better backup systems in place. It will relaunch as a private beta and be invitation only (he doesn't say why).
Larry suggests that web 2.0 sites disclose more about their infrastructure and backup procedures, so users can be more comfortable knowing how their data is being managed.

With this in mind, I think it appropriate to disclose some of the behind-the-scenes facts about Faves.com.

Faves was built by a professional development team (7 developers) beginning in 2005.
After having raised multiple rounds of funding, we realized that we were not earning enough money via advertising to sustain that team. In the Fall of 2008, Faves.com had to lay off all full time employees.
Faves.com is still be operated by myself, and 1 part-time operations person.
While somewhat downsized, we retain a fairly large scale data center with 4 front-end web servers, and 6 backend database servers.
We perform nightly incremental backups of all of our data, as well as complete datbase snapshots taken on a weekly basis.
We have NOT done a recent full-scale data recovery test, though we used to restore a snapshot of our site to our test server we used for internal develpment.
We recently raised a small round of financing which will enable Faves.com to continue to operate for the foreseeable future (2+ years, even without increasing our site revenue).
We also have concerns about our site performance, and have prioritized migrating to a cloud-based backend.

As we evolve the Faves.com service, we are looking to be more relevant to users who are increasingly adopting Facebook or Twitter as the primary means of communicating with their friends, family, and co-workers. We are also finding that a large proportion of users of our site are not authentic "bookmarkers", but rather are creating links to other web sites for marketing, or spam.

Our challenges, and priorities, going forward are:

Improve site performance and reliability.
Make Faves.com more relevant and useful to users of Facebook and Twitter.
Put better systems in place for dealing with spam users and adult content
Reduce reliance on advertising as a revenue model (ask Faves users to directly support the site, via donations or premium features).

If you have feedback for me, you can send me mail at mike at faves.com.

Faves is up and running again

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:31:00 +0000

We were able to get our servers started in our new location as of Saturday at 6pm. Our new ISP is WowRack. They've been really helpful during our move and we love our new location (I wish my office had a view like this one!)

Mohit and Lee (pictured) and I started powering down our servers at 9am. We moved them to the Westin Building (our new location) in two trips (taking care to move our master and slave database replicas in two different trips in case we had a car accident!).

Racking the servers went pretty smoothly, and we were able to take the opportunity to clean up some of the wiring that built up over the last 2 years. We've gained remote power management in this new location - which means we can reboot servers without taking a trip to the data center on the rare occasion where that is needed.

Now that our move is complete, we're looking forward to refreshing Faves.com by making some performance improvements, and making it an even better utility for social bookmarkers.

Faves will be down until Sunday, March 22, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 04:59:00 +0000

We are moving the computers for the Faves.com service this weekend. Your Faves bookmarks will not be available during this period. We hope to have all services restored from our new data center by Sunday, March 22nd. We're sorry if we've caused you any inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

Faves.com is "moving"

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:02:00 +0000

We are planning to move the Faves.com servers in the next couple of weeks. We will continue to run Faves.com, but are taking steps to reduce the costs of our infrastructure. Other than being down for one weekend in March, our users should not notice anything different about Faves.com before or after our move.

Since we are planning on having a site outage, it's a good time to remind you that you can make a backup of the bookmarks you've saved on Faves. See this blog post:

Export Your Faves

Facebook Application: Enabling detailed newsfeed and wall posts

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:46:00 +0000

We recently launched a Facebook application that automatically posts your Faves to your Facebook wall and friends' newsfeeds. Unfortunately, Facebook by default only allows applications to publish "one-line" updates. However, with a few steps, you can enable more detailed updates.

First, note how a Fave looks in a "one-line" update vs. a "short" update.

If you would like to enable the "short" update, simply follow these steps:

Enjoy!

Faves is back up

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Tue, 27 May 2008 21:34:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Tue, 27 May 2008 21:15:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 02:06:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 04:31:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 08:56:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 03:03:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 19:35:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:39:00 +0000

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"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 21:32:00 +0000

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?

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 18:59:00 +0000

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?

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 16:43:00 +0000

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?

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 02:06:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 04:38:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 15:46:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Koss) — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 21:33:00 +0000

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