Ozzy, our Director of PR got a new laptop. This time with a chew resistant cable.  But he still had great difficulty defragmenting his hard-drive.

Guess Labradoodle’s ain’t so smart after all…

We just got back from our team days at the beach. This time to Tioman Island.
Here’s our favourite group picture.

Our Magic Mushrooms are blooming! Upon eating a piece KhaiLee  actually grew taller.

How often have you come across a cool website or news article and just wished that there was a faster, simpler, and easier way to share it with your friends?

On BlinkList you have always been able to do this by simply clicking on the “E-mail friends” button when you blink a site.  The advantages of this are straight forward:

First, you can instantly share and email any link to any of your friends in one click.  Second, BlinkList will remember your friends email addresses and automatically suggest your friends email address to you the next time you want to share a link again. 

Third, we just enabled you to share blinks privately so if you want to forward a link to many users you can now click on the BCC field if you don’t want people to know who you forwarded a particular site to.

Let me know if you have any questions on how sharing of blinks works on BlinkList.

We just wanted to let you know of the new QuickStart page that BlinkList launched a short while ago.  What is the QuickStart page?

The FASTEST, most convenient way to get to all the websites you visit most often.  Why?

You get instant access to the websites you always visit

Eg. Start typing “G” in the searchbox… “Gmail” is instantly suggested, you hit “Go” and we take you there.

You get instant access to your BlinkList tags.

Eg. Choose MyList, type “W” and we may suggest “Work”. Hit “Go”, and we’ll show you all your blinks tagged with “work”.

Instantly have all your favorite, important links you visit most frequently right in front of you!

You can create as many lists as you like!

Such as…

• Personal, work,
• Daily, weekly reading
• To read, to try,
• Top tools, top blogs,
• QuickBlinks
• Any list you want!

You have to try this out. Go and add your first list to your QuickStart page now.

If you love NetVibes you are going to love this QuickStart page since it has the same clean look and feel and drag and drop capabilities to quickly configure your QuickStart page. 

Today we rolled out a new improvement on BlinkList that has been one of the top user requests we have received lately.  What lots of users wanted was a quicker, faster way to scan through their collection of links.  While all of the detaild information for links (such as the thumbnails, full descriptions, ratings, tags, dates) can be useful, sometimes you just want to be able to quickly scan through your links.

This is now possible with the new “List View” which only shows you the most important info for each of you links.  Here is a screenshot of the List vs. the Full View.

Full View:

List View:

Once you select the “list view” you will retain this view whether you are on your own page, another user page, or on a discovery page.  Please note that the list view is not available for IE 6 users.

Today we rolled out a tiny improvement that could have big impact on further enhancing the fun of shared discovery on BlinkList. 

Just yesterday I wrote that on BlinkList you can automatically see if one of your friends have blinked a site when you notice a smiley in front of a link like this:

Well, it turns out that after a while the smiley is not all that interesting because more often than not, you are just too lazy to click to find out who of your friends has blinked the site.  So, today we replaced the smiley icon with an icon with a small profile picture of your friends.  This small change has immediately made surfing on BlinkList way more fun!  It now looks like this:

So, if your friends have blinked a site, you will now always see their profile pictures show up.  What if two of your friends have blinked a site?  Well, in that case we show the profile pic of the person that first blinked the site.

Let us know your thoughts!  We love to keep innovating and look forward to making BlinkList better and better. 

PS: For the rest of the week we are focusing on a new server upgrade since we know that speed and reliability is absolutely critical.  We are hoping that the new server will allow us to significantly speed up the site and make it much faster, more responsive, and more reliable during our peak hours.

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.”

Source: SEO Round Table Social Search Overview

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.

We are super excited to announce that we have just launched a brand new way of blinking all of your favorite websites.  While blinking was already fast, easy, and fun, it just got 10 times better! 

What did we do?  Here is a list of improvements:

- A floating blink it form:  First of all, to blink a site you will never ever have to leave the page that you are visiting again!  You will now see the blink it form show up right on top of the page that you are on.  Here is a screenshot:

- Support for all browsers: For the first time we are fully supporting Opera, Safari, FireFox, Flock, and of course Internet Explorer. 

- Star your favorite links: You can finally star a link as one of your favorite links the moment you blink a site.  This makes it far simpler and easier to get new links on to your QuickStart page in BlinkList.

- QuickBlinking is now lightning fast:  Quick blinking works much faster than before.  Give it a try.  When you quick blink, you will see an image pop up in the top left that says blinked.

(note: you have to be signed in for quick blinking to work.)

- Improved editing of your links: Editing blinks in blinklist got much better because it is now powered by the same bookmarklet

Get the new blink it buttons for your browser

To get the new blink it button for your browser you just need to go to your “options” page or the footer of BlinkList and click on “add BlinkList to browser.” 

Happy blinking!

Special thanks go to Jiangti and Chee Aun, who worked very hard on getting this new bookmarklet to work!

Today we opened up BlinkList Spaces for the public.  Previously, BlinkList Spaces was only available on an invitation only basis as we continue to make lots of tweaks and adjustments. 

Starting today, you no longer have to receive a special invitation.  Just click on Options and create your own personal BlinkList Space to collect and share the best resources that you find for your area of interest.

Obviously, we are far from finished with BlinkList Spaces and a lot of work remains to be done but the product has come far enough where we can now open it up.

As you have probably noticed, we have made lots of other tweaks and changes on BlinkList at a very rapid pace.  In fact, we are far behind announcing all of the enhancements on this blog since we are constantly testing, tweaking, and improving BlinkList on many fronts.

What can BlinkList Spaces do for you?

If you are passionate about something (or anything!)

Here is an easy way to help others learn about a topic or interest.
You can share your expertise, and attract like-minded people!

If your friends or colleagues want to pick each other’s brains…

Help each other stay updated on latest online reads and resources.
Now everyone in your group can see the most relevant news of the day.

If you teach a class…

BlinkList Spaces can be customized specially for you!
Involve students in contributing
to the class and learn from each other.

Here are a few sample BlinkList Spaces:
http://marketingtools.blinklist.com/
http://bus301.blinklist.com/
http://brainroom.blinklist.com/

To get started, just click on “Options > Build BlinkList Space”

If you want to learn how to use BlinkList Spaces for our classrooom, we have prepared a special page that you can view here:
http://www.blinklist.com/static/spaces-classroom.php