Our Blog Has Moved

Please visit our new blog at:

http://blog.mindvalley.com/

We thought it was time to kiss Blogger good bye and host our own blog here

Copyright in Web2.0 : Blatant Code theft of a Web 2.0 site

This post, and the entire blog has moved to http://blog.mindvalley.com/

The End of Social Bookmarking (at BlinkList)

How's the "Social Bookmarking" game coming along?

Whether or not you are one of the "social bookmarking" players,
or an observer, you have to admit... it is a tough market that is overfunded and has too many players.

Even the name "social bookmarking" is far from ideal. Bring that up to any potential user and they will turn around and say "huh?"

"Bookmarking" is no fun and it has never been fun. And it's associated with clutter. To go from "bookmarking" which is boring and tedious to "social bookmarking" just alienates even more users because people get confused.

It's an uphill battle towards mass adoption and even the big boys (well funded VC players) aren't gaining massive traction. (Look at the Alexa stats)

So, what will become of BlinkList? Do we continue to "innovate" and "differentiate ourselves from the competition"?

Well, we don't orient ourselves by the competition but by the potential of what we hope BlinkList to become. We are just in the very early stages of our evolution and have a lot more exciting ideas and innovations to bring to market. We think that the potential of "BlinkList" is huge, far bigger in fact, then "social bookmarking."

We have our own plan.

You'll notice a few suprises for you over the next 4 months, focused on helping you meet other people with shared passions, and having fun while discovering useful and interesting content.

In fact, one major innovation will help you "organize the long tail" is coming at you in a few days. More on that later.

But as a humble first step, we did some housekeeping, and renovated the current BlinkList.

Click here for the tip of the iceberg...

The Tip of the Iceberg - a new and improved BlinkList

We're so excited! We just rolled out a major new release of BlinkList. Here are some improvements, that we hope, will excite you, too!

Increased Speed!

Our initial benchmarking tests already show that BlinkLists is more than twice as fast than it has ever been!

Improved Discovery!

The main discovery page of BlinkList (you need to be signed into BlinkList to see the page) is polished up... we now
- highlight the top contributors of the day to make it even easier to find the most active people on BlinkList.
- We have also replaced the "Hot Now" blinks with "Top Rated." Once we roll out the new algorithm, you will notice that the "Top Rated" blinks will be more influenced by the ratings. We hope that this will entice even more people to participate and make the "Top Rated" section a great place for you to find some great Blinks!

Improved Navigation!

We completely redesigned the top bar of BlinkList to take up far less real estate and to make it far easier to navigate through the site.

Also, a brand new options page to makes it far easier for any BlinkList user to get up to speed and to find the tools and resources to get the most out of BlinkList.

RSS feed of your friends!

The watchlist on BlinkList has been one of the most popular features to help users find and stay connected with friends and with people that share the same passion. Now we have made it even easier for you to stay connected by giving you a feed to aggregate all of the latest links that your friends have been blinking.

It's been almost a year since we launched... how is BlinkList doing?

Overall, we just completed by far our most successful month to date and we are signing up new users at a record pace. If you take a look at Alexa (careful it is probably only useful for spotting overall trends), you will also see that over the past 6 months, BlinkList has started to separate itself from the pack of all the other social bookmarking sites such as Shadows, Bluedot, Magnolia, Simpy, etc.

What's next? There is a lot more to come! The next major improvement will be "BlinkList Spaces" which we alluded to in another post and which we hope to be launching shortly.

BlinkList Preparing For Big New Release

Over the next few weeks BlinkList will be rolling out several major new upgrades to our system. A lot of the magic will happen on the backend and by the time all is said and done, BlinkList should be blazingly fast once again.

In addition, we will be launching "BlinkList Spaces"

What are BlinkList Spaces?

Here are a few hints:

1) While you can soon create your own space on BlinkList, BlinkList Spaces is nothing like MySpace. However, on a fun note, Level 3 contacted us just after they had signed with MySpace and asked us if we were interested in becoming their customer. Now I have to say that is flattering but we still have a long way to go before we are in the same league. :-)

2) BlinkList Spaces is not like "groups." It goes far beyond the concept of "groups" that others have tried. However, you can most certainly share a space with a group of people, company, class, etc. but our guess is that having space will be far more fun.

Soon after launching BlinkList Spaces, we will also launch a "power tool." As one of our developers said:

"The power tool combined with syndication is soooooo damn awesome. I just wish you all could see it soon."

BlinkList speeds up thumbnail engine

Over the past few months we have received more and more user requests to add a thumbnail for their blinked site. Users often asked us why some links had thumbnails while others did not. The answer was that our thumbnail engine could not keep up with the rapid growth of BlinkList.

The rate at which the BlinkList community kept blinking was becoming too fast for the little thumbnail engine. So, after some important tweaks, it is now faster than ever so you should be able to see a thumbnail of all of the pages that you are blinking.

BlinkList Says No to Spammers - Bans over 2,000 Domains in 2 Days

Over the past week BlinkList got hit hard by spammers, far harder than ever before. One of the reason for the increased attention from spammers is that BlinkList continues to gain traction. As we see our visitors and traffic stats rapidly increase it is obvious that more and more of the bad guys will try to come after us.

However, one of the biggest new challenges that just emerged recently is that there are now automated tools that allow spammers to automatically keep submitting spam links into social bookmarking engines. That is just a shame but predictable just like there are lots of other spam tools available.

What have we done in response?

We dramatically improved our detection tools to capture spam and spammers and are deleting them from BlinkList. However, we did not stop there. To prevent spammers from coming back we have created a "BlackList" and we are now permanently banning domains.

The result:

- Since rolling this tool out just two days ago we have banned over 2,000 domains
- The quality of the content on our discovery pages has greatly improved

Fighting spammers is going to be an ongoing battle but fortunately the BlinkList community has been super supportive and they started even flagging spammers and tagging spammers as "worthless spam." In the future, we will give our community members additional tools to ensure that BlinkList remains spam free. These are still under wraps but should be rolled out over the coming weeks.

Thanks for all your help in kicking out the spam and spammers! We are determined to win this battle!