• Daily Visits
• Unique page views
• Promotion of a link by Twitter Delicious & Facebook (currently)
• The traffic you send by a specific channel

One True Fan Toolbar

The main interface for One True Fan currently is the toolbar.

Here you can see the toolbar on my screen just as I have become One True Fan of Techmeme – actually quite a hard challenge because Techmeme isn’t really a site with 100s of pages that you might normally browse.

You can gain more points by linking there, which I assume Louis has done a few times over the last couple of weeks as well as daily visits. I did manage to catch up though it is not something I could normally maintain as I don’t use Twitter.

The toolbar can get a little annoying – quite often I have forgotten to switch it off when taking screenshots, and for hardcore SEOs access to footer links can be impaired. Having to hide the toolbar on every page view when doing some work can be a pain, plus at times you are looking at lots of client sites which you might want to not permanently block, but turn off temporarily.
During the last month of alpha testing I even uninstalled the toolbar for a whole week due to these problems, and I know a few others have done the same. It is something that will hopefully be fixed soon.

One True Fan Profiles

The profiles provide a nice record of where you have been, which sites you have “captured” and which have fallen to your enemies or friends.

You can see I have been having a few small battles over various sites… well at least that is what some normal useage patterns can look like – I suppose if I was really “invested” in one of these sites then that would matter.

Being the One True Fan of Google will no doubt make a few readers LOL.

MyBlogLog Roots Empowering Marketers

3 years ago I explained why social media marketing sucks. I realise that monitoring of social media has improved a lot in the enterprise space over that time.

The team behind One True Fan are the original team members of MyBlogLog – all of them as far as I can tell. They have been off doing their own things for a few years. Eric was a co-founder of Gnip which is still doing well, but they are back to take another bite at the cherry.

MyBlogLog started off life as a tracking application – Eric wanted to see which links were popular on his blog. The widget came later as did the social graph, the collation of data etc.

I don’t think they have any plans with One True Fan to tackle content in quite the same way, though the questions I have asked have admitedly been focused on marketing features. I am a marketing geek after all.

Those still at Yahoo… please forgive me… I am going to refer to MyBlogLog in the past tense. There isn’t an indication what Yahoo will do with MyBlogLog.

One of the unique features of MyBlogLog was the ability of the widget to tell a site owner who was visiting. I am not referring to just looking at a widget, or an expanded list of the last 127 visitors that people played around with.

You could grab their user id as a javascript variable, and then use that to mine their social graph – only recently I discovered a WordPress plugin that works with that feature for some data mining, though it was a little bugged.

Big things are made about how Facebook is now expanding their special partnerships with a few sites to provide them with data about visitors before they have even logged in. MyBlogLog could do this 3 years ago, linked with lots of social graph information if a visitor included that on their profiles – you would also get a list of all their favorite blogs, and those in most cases were automatically added to after 5 or 10 visits.

You could also use the data to see what individuals were doing on your site, in some ways like expensive CRM systems such as Infusionsoft can tag people.
My friend Rob had a cool little tracking script that would log all the visitors to each page, so you could determine who were your biggest fans – I tested it for a little while. One day I was shocked to see one new visitor… a human not a bot read 52 pages of my blog in a single very long session – I think it was a Saturday and he just hung out reading.

You could also use the data to do all kinds of dynamic content targeting and data mining. In many ways Facebook are late to the game.

The problem is to actually use the MyBlogLog data there are some… issues

• You needed to be able to program and the API access had to be applied for on a per domain basis – not mass market.
• There were privacy concerns – if you started visibly profiling people and giving them rewards based on visits, and lots of people started doing it, there would have been a stink – this was the aftermath of the Facebook Beacon problems.

Tying similar technology into a toolbar of some kind makes sense because it is then installed specifically because people want their movement’s tracked to become the “One True Fan” or earn other rewards.

One True Fan Rewards

Things are a little vague on the rewards side – I have questioned Eric Marcoullier quite extensively about what will be possible, but you could really liken it more to a brain storming session than Eric explaining planned features.
There will be a way of delivering some kind of rewards – what criteria, how the delivery works etc we will have to leave for another day until things are a little more finalized. Things like coupon delivery in some way are a given, so are custom badges/patches.

Possible criteria:-

• Number of referrals (by some 2 way API integration or goals)
• Driving traffic
• Visiting certain pages
• Attaining a certain number of points
• Being One True Fan
• Visiting a certain number of times
• Visiting a certain number of consecutive days

A social media tell-a-friend rewards system on steroids.

Widgets

Apparently there is meant to be some widgets coming – I have no idea whether these might work with other platforms such as Facebook as an alternative for identity, but they are comimng all the same.

One True Fan Analytics Dashboard

One thing immediately “missing” is any kind of analytics, even as a toolbar user. If you are looking for click stats for links you share you are going to be disappointed for a while. You can get some idea from the number of points you gain.

Competitors

Badgeville – also launched at Techcrunch Disrupt – seems to be a white label solution for each brand site – mybe I am biased but I think it is the wrong solution for 99.9% of websites. They are a “solutions” provider for large sites, which means I am sure they are also charging a lot of money for implementation.

Chirrps – this seems like Entrecard 2.0 – despite having launched it is nowhere near the same level of sophistication.

Comment Luv – it might seem strange, but any incentive to visit other blogs, even if it is a just the ability to leave a comment is competition – in some ways even being a dofollow blog is an incentive as well – they have a referral program so I used a referral link.

Contest Burner – currently off the market but it is a WordPress plugin to run your own incentivized contests, rewarding things like tweets, comments, email subscriptions etc.

I don’t look on MyBlogLog or Blogcatalog to be competitors, as there isn’t really any competition for attention. One True Fan you gain points for visiting websites and promoting them which is complementary to other blogging and social media activities.

More details on Techcrunch, Louis Gray and Techmeme

For me it isn’t the game that excites me but the ability to identify those fans that are not immediately obvious.

I would be lying if I didn’t also appreciate the enhanced viral (incentivised) distribution of content.

Note: It is and Alpha version – for me, Beta starts around 90% feature complete for what should be there at public launch. Development is gong at an extremely rapid pace. Techcrunch reports $1.2M in the coffers but it was obvious there was going to be some significant investment with the number of early stage investors playing for the last few weeks.

I did a little test signup yesterday with a spare email account and received an email to signup within a few hours so signing up is worth doing – they are not going to keep you waiting forever.

Many bloggers look on their activity on social networks, social news and microblogging sites as an extension of their blog. For instance I look on my Stumbleupon blog as an ideal way to publish asides, or as a legitimate way to share cool content without having to worry about copyright issues that might be associated with sharing RSS items using Google Reader.
I am not a big fan of posts that are just a big links roundup.

Whilst it is easily possible to create a mashup of multiple RSS resources and feeds, and then combine them in some kind of universal widget, often the results are disappointing.

Blogcatalog Make It Easy With “My News Feed”

Feeds have now also been added to Blogcatalog profile pages

You will also notice in the top right corner of the widget that you can easily subscribe to the social lifestream of your favorite bloggers as a single feed.

Privacy

You have full control over what is shared from within Blogcatalog Dashboard setting

Bugs?

There are a few

I had to do a little CSS hacking to get the widget to display correctly with my theme, but I am sure Daniel from Blogcatalog will get those sorted out quickly.

The RSS feed needs a little work. There are duplicate lines, and it would be good to include snippets where available. I am also not sure I am a big fan of the tracking links on the blog posts that appear in the RSS feeds, but that probably helps on Blogcatalog ratings.

Disclaimer: I do some consulting with Blogcatalog

I do benefit potentially from long term promotion of Blogcatalog and by giving their competitors equal coverage I also gain a benefit, because if for instance MyBlogLog becomes a massive success, the value of competitors as a viable business also increases.

Thus it is actually with a very heavy heart that I am going to write what might be my first ever critical review of MyBlogLog.

It is my hope the MBL guys take this as constructive criticism, which I haven’t honestly seen on any other blog over the last couple of days since the features were announced, other than what seemed to be a universal yawn.

What Is Wrong With The Activity Time Line?

MyBlogLog have so far added 42 services, and I am only looking at a few of them.

However based on a comment over at Brian Solis the LifeStream currently supports

- Bebo
- Deli.cio.us
- Digg
- Flickr
- Jumpcut
- Last.FM
- MyBlogLog
- Netflix
- Stumbleupon
- Twitter
- Yahoo Answers
- Yelp
- YouTube
- Upcoming

Here are some quick annotated notes in a quick screenshot

Now I wouldn’t be so harsh if I hadn’t already read this comment by Eric on the Techcrunch writeup

Sadly, this feature has been ready to launch since June of 07, when it would have been a pioneer instead of a follower. Regardless, I’m psyched that the rest of the team had the temerity to stick it out at Yahoo in the belief that they would get to start launching killer features.

If this has been ready for 8 months and just needed pushing out of the door, you would expect a few refinements.

I have seen a few comments on the Techcrunch article suggesting that there is a lack of control of what you see in the timeline, either for privacy or information overload.
It is true that Blogcatalog have this side of the feature set more refined, but at the same time I am not a great fan of micro-management, and it is not needed with the current maximum of 40 people you follow… possibly because not enough people have added their services yet.

Tags

The way MyBlogLog has tagging implemented has always bugged me – all tags on the site still lead only to people and communities that have been tagged manually in the MyBlogLog system, rather than using the tags supplied within content with rel=”tag” or categories.

Here is an example

Those tags from Matt’s delicious feed lead to MyBlogLog’s internal tagging system, not where you would expect… either Matt’s or the global tags on Delicious. Very annoying.
It is equally annoying when you click similar tags below RSS items and again you are not presented with content.

No Mentions of Blogcatalog

Here are some reports on the MyBlogLog new features, but they ignore Blogcatalog

ReadWriteWeb
Techcrunch
Mashable
Louis Grey
Cnet
Brian Solis (Brian I am disappointed)
Webomatica
Download Squad

Best of all, Read Write Web did a round up of 35 Life Streaming sites, and for some reason Blogcatalog didn’t make that list either.

I know everyone is talking about FriendFeed which has some useful viral ideas to encourage everyone to sign up, and their Facebook integration really kicks butt.
I have a problem with FriendFeed – it is trying to grab the conversation from the various services with an internal comment system. I am not sure that is healthy.

MyBlogLog have added some kind of blog comment monitoring system, that is a good idea and something I have nudged the Blogcatalog guys about a few weeks ago, but moving the comments to FriendFeed? I am not happy with that.

If you want to compare, here is the current list of “LifeStream Supported” services on Blogcatalog

Amazon Wishlist, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Myspace Blog, Sphinn, StumbleUpon, Twitter, YouTube

I believe there are 15 others on the way soon.

There are some inherent problems with all of these platforms… information overload and lack of specific topical areas or niches. Once you go beyond your core friends, the noise increases.

I really want to throw a wide net for information retrieval, but I only want some of it.

Update

For those unaware of some of the features introduced by Blogcatalog over the last 6 months here are some links to relevant articles.

For the programming geeks, you might be interested in the BlogCatalog API which was introduced August 2007

If you are looking to differentiate between MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog, I wrote this article back on July 2007 and it covers many of the differences which are still true today.

More recently, Blogcatalog partnered with SezWho to enable a comprehensive comment feedback system. At that time they also surpassed MBL on Alexa, though as everyone knows Alexa stats are not the most accurate to go by, and the unique differences between the services create a different usage profile.

To compare social graph features, I would suggest my article from when Blogcatalog introduced their dashboard 2 weeks ago. Of particular interest for many are the very specific controls available to protect your privacy, or to control which information you receive from different people.

p.s. I don’t class the problems previously with the messaging system as a negative review – I think that was more a general outburst from the whole blogosphere.

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.

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.

Note: I would certainly look on this interface as alpha or beta stage – as more data gets added, it is certainly going to get crowded, and I have also noted some delays in updates, though that appears to be an internal bug, as the data does seem to be fetched to other pages.

Update

I am certainly not perfect and missed something whilst digging around, which was actually mentioned in the full announcement on the Blogcatalog boards.
This is I suppose one of the negatives of previewing something before the official announcement, and wanting to post early.

With the dashboard settings, you can choose to follow the social graph of up to 40? people – as I didn’t spot this on my own, maybe something needs to be made a little clearer for new users.

You also have full control of both what you see and what you share with others

I would of course like the option to see all of my contacts on every service, and all my friends on Blogcatalog, with an option to create multiple views depending on how much noise I have time for.

There is even enhanced privacy, allowing you to selectively remove items you don’t want shared.

When you look at the combined data, it can get a little scary – this is all public data, and it hasn’t taken much to combine it and create an overall personal online profile of all your activities, even those that might normally be slightly more hidden, such as stumbling a friends blog in a topic you might not normally be associated with.

The interface is actually a lot more complete than I first of all realised.

As usual I am trying to give balanced coverage, Mybloglog had an article all to themselves the other day.
Specific dislosure:- Since July 2007 I have had some financial involvement with Blogcatalog as a consultant, though I try hard to give fair and equal coverage to their competitors.

With the recently introduced API still in closed beta, I can only imagine they are going to add a little more to the information panel in the future to expose your activities in the “social cloud”.

They have limited the widget to 7 colours, no MyBlogLog green, but you can go for Yahoo purple – I would have liked a white with black borders, but have opted for black.

The description shown is very short, so you might want to optimize your description on MyBlogLog to have a very powerful first line.

In addition only 5 of your registered blogs are show, and currently there is no way within MyBlogLog to change the order your blogs are displayed, so in my case I can’t promote my involvement at Collective Thoughts.

Apparently they will also offer the possibility to skin the widgets in the future, so that will solve the colour co-ordination problems.

Update

Kent Brewster’s new Blog Juice widget is very cool as well. You can actually browse from one community to another with it without opening a new page.