Allow Twitter to Scrape Your Personal Information In Gmail

I have written extensively about the problems associated with Viral Tell-A-Friend systems. People are becoming careless with personal and business security, and soon adding an email and password to a box will be as common as handing over an email address… but with dire consequences.

My opinion, Techcrunch shouldn’t publish what they found in Twitter’s undie drawer… but only with the provision that they remove the hypocritical viral tell-a-friend, and encourage other startups to do the same… until they learn to use APIs correctly.

Dopplr manage  to use APIs for TAF without the massive funding, and Gigya seem to have some API support.

Let something good come of this, and get all major social sites to stop scraping 3rd party accounts as well.

The BlogCatalog REST (REpresentational State Transfer) API allows the retrieval of public user and blog data based on a set of input parameters. This page outlines the various types of requests that can be executed and provides example requests and responses.

I had a play around with it early today for the first time and a couple of bugs were cleaned up since then and I think developers will find the terms of use fairly unrestricted.

I have actually suggested some additional changes to the terms, so I wouldn’t assume they are set in stone.

I also spotted on the forums that Blogcatalog are giving away free platinum memberships to people who use the APIs creatively.

Other Blogcatalog Changes Over The Last Week

• You can now search the forums for previous discussions before submitting a question
• There is no longer a need to provide Blogcatalog a link to identify you as the owner of your blog, this can be achieved with meta tag verification.
• You can now make modifications to your profiles without having your blog added to the moderation queue of new submissions. (improve those landing pages)
• The Blogcatalog broadcast system is now available to everyone
• Blogcatalog now create their own thumbshots for higher quality, and possibly higher reliability

Specific Dislosure – I do some consulting with Blogcatalog on a very much low key, part time basis, though I also give coverage to their competitors and try to remain impartial

Some things Blogcatalog currently do different to MBL

1. The front page heavily promotes and rotates bloggers, though one small section is for their supporters, most of it is free
2. They introduced tags before I had even spoken to them, though they were somewhat limited.
3. They were pulling in content snippets from blogs rather than just 3 titles before MBL
4. Blog Reviews and voting widgets that control listings, in addition to how active you are control your rating and thus your placement
5. Listings By Category
6. Listings by Country
7. Listings by User
8. Shout-to-Shout
9. OPML for Communities you join
10. Links to related blogs
11. Links to related bloggers
12. Ability to manually change the display order of your communities and friends (to show your best friends)
13. Ability to report something as spam without using email
14. Real tagging based on content linking to content (not fully implemented yet)
15. The forums…
16. The forum widgets
17. Auto thumbnail refreshes
18. XML-RPC
19. Full contact details including a toll free phone number
20. Tag based feeds
21. Related tags
22. Manual Inclusion (moderation by hand)

That doesn’t cover what Rose feels is copied, the main social features that are similar to many social networks with friends and communities, and the widgets… that is what I was referring to as being cloned in my original review of Blogcatalog.

MBL has a lot of unique features as well

1. Tracking (huge)
2. Auto join of sites you visit
3. Most popular links in your communities
4. Automatic display of your most frequently visited blogs
5. A lot more additional social networks and more control over who sees them
6. When they were just doing tracking, they used to have an affiliate program
7. Until recently having a company blog was a unique feature
8. As you have pointed out, legal documents, but so many sites don’t have it, though that isn’t an excuse – ask Techcrunch where their’s is?
9. Tell A Friend
10. New neighbors
11. Thumbnail editing (when you first subscribe)
12. Coauthors
13. WordPress.com support
14. Myspace Support
15. Owned by Yahoo and running on shiny new servers
16. User generated tagging
17. Suggestion Board
18. Yahoo Groups Mailing List
19. No advertising
20. Avatars By Comments
21. Click counters (really part of tracking)

Most of the above were present in Blogcatalog before I was giving them any help, and most of the advise was just re-emphasising things I had suggested to MBL and Bumpzee previously.

Don’t look at the number of points, as many of the MBL features are quite major differences, such as tracking, and some of the Blogcatalog features are interconnected.

Mass Broadcast

As announced a few days ago, MyBlogLog have modified their mass broadcast feature so it is possible to opt out of email messages. Previously there was almost universal concern over abuse.

There are still some differences in execution – MBL broadcasts can be public or private. BC broadcasts are all private.
BC broadcasts include a group discussion thread for the broadcast message.

Eric

Eric is off to take a well deserved rest and spend some quality time with family.

Over the last 7 or 8 months I have had some fairly intense discussions with Eric, in both good times and a few stormy interludes, including one 2 hour chat on Skype once things had calmed down a little.

I sincerely wish him all the best for the future.

My Integrity Under Question?

Rose seems to think somehow I am being in some way biased towards Blogcatalog, or looking at them with… hmm… “rose tinted glasses” seems to be a suitable expression.

This is partially to do with my open disclosure that Blogcatalog have offered to give me some financial compensation for all the ideas I have been offering them for free, most of which I had also given to the MyBlogLog team in the past.

As examples of the free information that both have had the benefit of, here is my original MyBlogLog wishlist and my forward thinking ideas of what should be possible with the MyBlogLog API.

Tim Nash a while back at Hackday in London had a chance to actually get hands on with the MBL API and it will be interesting what people create with it.

Having an API is a logical progression for Blogcatalog as well.

It is actually quite strange that my integrity is somewhat under attack at the same time as Eric, probably the person I have interacted with the most at MBL is departing.
I know that Tod, John and Steve have also spent time reading my suggestions in the past, but most of my interaction was with Eric and Rafer in the early days.

I still have some historical connection with Robyn, as I was reading her blog well before she joined the MyBlogLog team, and she was reading mine.

The fact that I have some minor financial interest with Blogcatalog has in some ways prevented being able to help MyBlogLog more interactively which is a shame as lots of things had been discussed although they may not have come to fruition.

At the same time the long term success of Blogcatalog is heavily linked to that of MyBlogLog, to the extent that if MyBlogLog is highly successful, Blogcatalog will also have more success.

If anything I am inclined to promote all 3 competing services, MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, and Blogcatalog a lot more, and in equal amounts.

Just because one service has decided to give me some financial compensation doesn’t mean I am handcuffed from helping the others, and all email correspondence I have had with each site developer has remained strictly confidential.

I have deliberately not included Bumpzee in this comparison because it would just confuse things. In many ways Bumpzee is offering very similar features, but the implementation is very different.

“An incoming tide raises all ships”

Update

As is always the case, things can still be overlooked even if you try to be as comprehensive as possible. I am adding things in bold to the bottom of the lists as I spot them.

If you can think of some things that I have missed that should be included, and aren’t covered by a more global point raised, please mention it in the comments and I will be glad to add it, and give you some link credit within the post.

Specific Disclosure: I have been providing a lot of free ideas and feedback both publicly and in private to the 3 main (imho) competitors in this niche, MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, and Blogcatalog, and all 3 would probably look on me as one of their largest supporters, in spirit if not in traffic (I can’t compete with Techcrunch).
With Blogcatalog I have to note that the arrangements are now slightly more formal in a consultancy capacity from which I may receive financial compensation