Friday, January 18, 2008

Blendix Update

Glyph just posted a great entry on Blendix -- I highly recommend it!

We've had a really excellent response from tons of new users both with accolades and fantastic suggestions. You guys are awesome and I hope you stick with us, helping us make this app something useful to you and one that you enjoy using :-)

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6 comments:

B said...

I have been looking for something like Blendix for a long time. I've got crap all over the web. My friends and family have the same. I finally feel like something is using the internet, not just staking a claim and putting up a gated community. One thing I would like to see if the ability to customize how things are displayed, as opposed to just chronologically.

Duncan McGreggor said...

B,

Glad you hear you like Blendix so far :-) I've also got a similar wish, and it's slated for either beta 3 or the 1.0 release (I don't have the notes with me, and I'm away from the office for a week).

The feature I'm championing is filtering the "activity page" (e.g., http://blendix.com/users/oubiwann). I want to be able to say "Just show me Twitter posts" or "just blogs" or "show me recent tracks, svn commits and wishlists". I think the only thing really holding us back from immediate work on that is coming up with a really clever and *not ugly* UI widget that makes sense to people.

Is that the kind of thing you had in mind? Or just simple sorting?

B said...

that is what I had in mind, but I wasn't sure of the complexity of it. You certainly don't want to have the busy interfaces you get with MySpace and Facebook. Its freakin distracting. If just simple sorting is easier, maybe that is the way to go. At least as a baby step.

GregP said...

I'm pretty psyched about this too. I'm not much of a social-networker, i.e. MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, etc., but I do try to follow my friend's Amazon Wish Lists, blogs, Flickr accounts, and Last.fm activity, so Blendix is perfect for me. I like the interface - uncluttered and clean - and the general idea behind it: one-stop-browsing for all your friends' online content.

I spent some time today setting up profiles for my friends, but I'm wondering, is there a way that I could have simply found the personal profiles that my friends had already created for themselves and just copied them over to my profile? I didn't see any way to do this.

Duncan McGreggor said...

GregP, awesome -- you are a perfect example of one of our target audiences... one that other services seem to be overlooking.

To answer your question, yes there is a simple way to do that right now: the search functionality in the upper right of the page (the magnifying glass). I will update the FAQ to point this out to folks.

However, for the full beta 2 release ("real soon now"), we'll have a special kind of importer in place: you will be able to pull in email addresses from your gmail account and Blendix will search its stores for any matches, displaying the results so you can choose which ones you want to subscribe to.

For now, due to privacy concerns, we will only be displaying users from your gmail contact that already have entries in Blendix (in other words, no new entries will be created from your gmail contacts). Once we have a solid privacy policy in place, we'll begin releasing additional features for the importer.

GregP said...

Ah, yes, that's exactly what I was looking for, so much easier.

The expanded feature planned for the next version sounds awesome, looking forward to that.