Blogcatalog Give Purpose To The Social Graph

Wednesday, February 20, 2008 by Mistlee

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Blogcatalog Give Purpose To The Social Graph

By Ross Mayfield

If you are a devotee of Facebook or Myspace, I have a message for you...

There is a World Outside Your Fishtank

Within "blogging" social networks I have been pushing to have a reason to add someone as a friend for a long time. Blog broadcasts, built in feed readers and OPML will eventually provide a reason to join communities.

I know that MyBlogLog are planning to also launch something similar and I have a feeling this will likely kick off more people claiming Blogcatalog is just a copycat of Mybloglog.

Blogcatalog Dashboard

I first had a sneak peak at the Dashboard a few days ago and gave Tony from Blogcatalog a lot of ideas for features, such as:-

• adding snippets to the social news items, Digg buttons (title, desciption and button = old Digg Interface… yay!)

• merging URLs from multiple submissions

• pulling in friends from all your social profiles
The thing is, Blogcatalog was already collecting feed items, and displaying those from the communities you joined, and there was also a need to somehow draw other discussions taking palce on Blogcatalog into a single portal - discussions - groups - broadcasts


The social profiles have been available for some time, it is just they weren't being used effectively, and because there was not such a purpose in updating the profiles (unless you know a little about SEO, branding and reputation management), it actually makes testing and reviewing the new features difficult.

So what is really needed is for people who have Blogcatalog accounts to add their social profile information until such time as friend data is being pulled in from places like Twitter directly through their API.

Then again, you might not want to see all the updates from that many friends all on one page - it is something that needs careful thinking about, and I have some ideas I need to map out for the development guys.

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