BlinkList Advances Social Search and Discovery
We are excited to announce that BlinkList has rolled out a few major improvements that greatly enhance social discovery on BlinkList.
The new enhancements make it far simpler to discover people with a shared passion and to see what your friends have been discovering online.
Why is there so much buzz right now regarding social search?
From SEO Round Table: “… possibly because algorithmic search has plateaued to some extent, also humans are still better than computers at many things and there are thousands of volunteers to help in social search.”
BlinkList is advancing social discovery and social search along the following dimensions.
1) BlinkList automatically helps you find users with a shared passion
Any user on BlinkList that checks out one of his or her tags, will automatically start to see some of the most active people that have also recently been blinking similar sites. These users are highlighted like this:
2) BlinkList automatically surfaces the shared passions between two users
When you visit another user’s page, it used to be hard to quickly find out what if anything you have in common with that user. One of the reason this used to be hard is that active users can accumulate thousands of tags.
We have solved this problem by identifying and surfacing the shared interests automatically. This makes discovery far more fun because you are immediately drawn to what you and the other BlinkList user have in common. It looks like this:
3) On BlinkList you automatically see if any of your friends have blinked a site.
When you find a great new website, news article, or funny video, it is a lot of fun to know if some of your friends have also blinked the same page. Previously this used to be impossible but now this information is automatically surfaced by displaying a friendly smiley icon that indicated that one of your friends have blinked the same page. This also greatly enhances discovery on BlinkList because as you browse through public links, you can quickly spot the links that your friends have found interesting enough to blink. Once you spot the smiley, all you need to do is click on the blink it button to see which of your friends have also blinked the same site.
4) On BlinkList you can quickly find others that have blinked your site
On BlinkList, you can quickly find all the other people that have publicly blinked the same site as you did. All it takes is one click on the big blink it button or one click on the smiley if one of your friends have also blinked the same site. Once you click on the blink it button, you see the people that have first and most recently blinked the same link as you. This is a great way to find people that share exactly the same interests as you do on BlinkList.
5) On BlinkList you can easily discover what your friends have been up to
Sometimes when when you just want to browse on the net and spend some time surfing don’t you wish you could just discover all the cool sites your friends have been discovering online? Well now you can on BlinkList.
On the main user page, you already see your contacts that have been most recently active like this:
However, that is only the beginning. To passively see what your friends and the people that you are watching have been discovering online, just go to your friends page (click on view all friends) and you find a whole new new world of discovery.
On the friends page you will automatically see all of the latest sites that have been blinked by your friends. In this example you I can see that Jiangti has just been very active and what he has been blinking.
6) On the friends page you can automatically find other people like you
When you are first getting started on BlinkList, you might not have a lot of your friends on the site. However, BlinkList will automatically start to recommend “other BlinkList people” like you to you. This is a great way to rapidly start discovering more people with a shared passion and to start discover great content on BlinkList.
Much work remains to be done and we at BlinkList are just at the very beginning of truly exploring the potential of social search, discovery, and recommendations. However, what is already clear, is that the latest improvements have made discovery on BlinkList far more personal and far more interesting than before.
Please let us know your thoughts on our latest improvements and let us know how how we can further improve our service.
December 17th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
I was looking forward to this! Thanks for the hard work.
December 18th, 2006 at 4:52 am
[…] Today BlinkList announced a big pile of changes aimed at the social aspects of bookmarking (well, they use the phrase “search and discovery”). Some really cool stuff too, especially related to spotting what friends are up to -and- making new connections with folks that have similar interests. […]
December 18th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
[…] OK, in a previous post I talked about switching to del.icio.us because successful people I think really have it going on use it. But, honestly, my first love has been blinklist. Shortly after that I see a post on Handy’s blog saying that blinklist has added more social networking aspects, something I have felt they do better than del.icio.us (a name I hate typing, a point against and I’m not kidding). […]
December 18th, 2006 at 9:36 pm
It sounds to me like Blinklist is moving in all the right directions. The future is all about discovering potential friends that you have things in common with - wherever they may be! But this feels like a more interesting way to do it than del.icio.us or other sites.