The MyBlogLog Blog

Some thoughts on the community messaging feature

Hey all --

There's been a ton of feedback about the new community messaging feature so far and I just wanted to thank you.  Whether you post something on your blog, leave a comment on ours or just send an email to us, we're reading everything and discussing them.  There have been plenty of positive comments and plenty of critical ones and every one is valuable.  Here are a couple of thoughts:

1) It's pretty much impossible with a service this size to put something out that is universally loved.  Other than giving away free money, I don't think there's a single thing we could launch that didn't get criticized.  Please don't take this as a cop out, it's just cold reality.  Whether you love it or hate it, there's 180,000 people who might feel otherwise.

2) So what do you do if every feature you want to release has potential criticisms?  What most big companies do is wring their hands trying to find a solution that meets everyone's needs and the net result is usually a crap, middle of the road feature that fails to excite a single person and takes six months to get out the door.  We sort of fell into that trap for a while -- you may have noticed the lack of new features for the first part of this year?

Instead, we're going back to our startup roots.  We're going to release the germ of an idea knowing it's not perfect and we're going to solicit feedback and make changes accordingly.  No matter how long and hard we think about a feature, we're never really going to know what you want or how you want it.  So tell us and we'll try to make it better.

3) We're not going to make any immediate changes.  We released community messaging last night and an hour later there was some pretty vocal criticisms.  It's pretty tempting to just start making changes left and right in an attempt to make things better.  But that way lies madness.  We're going to leave it in the wild for a week, let people give us feedback, and make some decisions.  And in case you're creating your posting schedule for next week, we're going to give more weight to the things people say after living with it for a week than people who see it and respond today (positive or negative).

4) So far, the majority of criticisms come from people in 300 or more communities.  They are worried about the potential for spam and heck, I hear you.  I'd be worried too.  I'll leave it for other people to debate why someone would join 5,000 communities and focus instead on pure numbers.  The vast majority of our users belong to a couple dozen communities that they have a genuine interest in and wish to take part in.  I'm not going to get all Spock on you and talk about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few (or the one), but it does impact our thinking.

If you've got an opinion, please leave your comment in the original post (helps us keep things organized).

Have a great weekend!

More Messaging News

At the same time that we rolled out the new layout of the Community Pages, we added one other feature that you will probably love.  Due to popular demand, we have made it possible to send messages to your entire community in one quick step.

By clicking "Message Members", you'll be taken to this screen:

If your community members have chosen to receive email notifications when they receive a message, they'll be notified of your message via email.  Either way, they'll see your message on their profile page when they login again.

Of course, some members may get a little message happy, but again, any spam moderation on this feature is up to you.  Spam is in the eye of the beholder, or something like that, so if you are receiving spam, just leave the person's community by clicking Leave Community on their community's page. 

We hope you enjoy this new messaging feature as well.  Please let us know what you think.

Your Community Messaging Is A-Changin'

In all things, we at MyBlogLog strive for complete community moderation.  While that's not always possible, we get really excited when we are able to roll out a feature that puts the power completely in your hands. 

While spam is something that every site will have to bear, we think we've found a way to not only allow you to moderate your comments, but to take the conversation back to your own blog, right where every site owner wants it to take place.

Introducing MyBlogLog's revamped Community Pages (coming very, very soon to a MyBlogLog page near you):

And, my favorite part, check out what happens when you click the RSS subscribe feed:

I love it!  And, when we saw the suggestion board today, we started to wonder if Stephen (MyBlogLog profile) had been spying on us.

Several members of our team sent me that link today!  It made us all giggle.  Well, the guys laughed in a manly sort of way and I giggled. ;)

Anyway, our hope is that you end up with more conversation, more RSS subscriptions and Mo Money, Mo Money, Mo Money (just kidding of course).  Now YOU decide what is and is not spam.  All of the conversation will be completely in your control, on your own blog.

Sure, you can still leave people messages on their profile page, and there will still be a spam reporting feature there, but for the most part, we hope that all that talkin' takes place on your home turf. 

Note, since the old messages meant so much to many of you, we've decided to leave them up for a week or so, to give you time to archive them on your own site, if you wish.  You can find a link to your old messages at the bottom of your community page.  However, soon they will be removed permanently, so save them if you want them.

We hope you like this new format.  It really was designed with you and your needs in mind.  Thanks for being a part of our family!

How Can We Make This Site Better?

We know you have some great ideas.  That's why we made hearing your ideas a top priority. 

In the past, many of you have taken time to send us messages and leave comments as to how we can improve everything from customer service to UI, and many of your cool ideas have made it onto the site.  We can't thank you enough for caring enough to give us your feedback.

In the last few weeks, we put our heads together and decided a customer-focused suggestion board was the way to go.

I think Wendy (MyBlogLog Profile Here) says it best:

But one-off suggestions won’t be heard as much as a consensus of voices on new feature and functionality requests - and MBL just launched a new section of the Yahoo Suggestion Board dedicated specifically to user requests for improvement.

Our hope is that we will be able to serve you better, not only by having all of your suggestions in one place, but by also allowing you to vote on any suggestions you agree need to be implemented. 

One caveat:  This is a great place to tell us what you wish we were doing.  This is NOT a great place to ask for help.  If you need help with the widget, with the tracking code, with login, or help with whatever else, please continue to look at the Help area and send us a message at CustomerService@MyBlogLog if you need further assistance.  Thanks again for being part of our family!

Hot Member - Ilker Yoldas

When we first launched the tagging feature, we mentioned that we'd use the Hot Member tag to find our next Hot Members.  This way, when you meet a cool member, oops, I mean a Hot Member, you can tag them and we feel we'll really be getting the pulse of the community.

So, without further ado, here's your latest Hot Member profile.

Ilker Yoldas is a long-time member with a hoppin' community here at Mybloglog.  A testament to someone who knows how to make friends without spamming, Ilker has a built The Thinking Blog's community into a talkative area that is always full of great conversation.  We salute Ilker for being the first ever community-chosen Hot Member here at MyBlogLog. 

So go read The Thinking Blog and congratulate Ilker on being the latest Hot Member on MyBlogLog!  And, don't forget, if you come into contact with a Hot Member, tag them as HotMember, and give them the accolades they deserve.

MyBlogLog In The Wild - The Ultimate Guide To MBL

Today I came across this great post by Kyle Eslick called The Ultimate Guide To Using MyBlogLog.  I thought it was a great post, really explaining the MyBlogLog machine in a thoughtful and concise way.

Note the CSS and Javascript help it offers people who are not perfectly happy with the display of the widget, as it relates to the individual design of their own page:

Luckily, there are several ways to alter the appearance to have your widget look however you want. Where it says width=200 in my example above, you can change this to the width of where you want to put it (usually about 10px less than your sidebar if placing in your sidebar). You can add and subtract rows by setting the rows=7 code to the number of rows you want.

There are even some CSS layouts that the author has created for use on your own blog, including one for light and one for dark pages.  As well, pay close attention to the SoloSEO tools listed in the post.  Many of our members brag on these tools and use them daily.

As well, speaking of integration into your blog, a while back I noted that Drupal has a module for MyBlogLog now (MyBlogLog Drupal Community).  While preparing this post I also noticed that Joomla, one of my favorite CMS platforms, also now has a Joomla MyBlogLog extension. 

Take a look at The Ultimate Guide To MyBlogLog and be sure to tell Kyle how much you appreciated it on his blog or at his community on MyBlogLog.  Thanks for the great post Kyle!

Have you written a guide to MyBlogLog or anything that you think we should call attention to here on the blog?  If so, send me an email alerting me to your post at robyn@mybloglog.com.

What Defines A Great Community Member?

1.  A Desire To Share And Broaden Your Knowledge
A member who is in a community because he wants to learn more or share more about a given topic is usually someone who does well in a community. 

Conversely, a member who has only selfish reasons for being in a community, will not be able to fully experience any community site.  I'm always saddened to read that someone came here only to send their link out to the allotted 20 people per day.  It seems to be such a waste of time, since traffic that results from spam is rarely useful to the site owner in terms of subscriptions, advertisements, sales, etc.

2.  A Desire To Make Friends
I scan through the conversations I see on MyBlogLog and it's heartening to see how many online friendships have developed through this community.  By being able to find people with similar interests, some of our members have decided to co-author blogs together. I've also seen friendly banter that has turned into real friendship.  Making friends with similar interests is integral to any community site.
 

3.  A Desire To Work Within The System
The policies that we set up here are always created with your needs in mind.  The 'community-join' limitations, the Rock Star message algorithm, the racy avatar deletions and the spam flags were all designed to help our users.  Each was created because of an outcry from the community.

A moderately skilled techie can build a bot or any other type of program to overcome these systems, but users who genuinely care about the other members, like they were real people (because they are), would never consider harming their fellow MyBlogLog friends. 

4.  A Wholistic, "What's Best For The Community" Outlook
The perfect example of this, is the response to the racy avatars I've been deleting lately (over a hundred in the last two weeks, by the way). 

1. Some people ignore the fact their avatars have been deleted and post another, just as bad as the first.   
2. Some people will ask why their avatar is wrong, since the human body is beautiful.  Agreed and agreed, but it's not really fair to ask business sites and family blogs to either show your avatar when you visit or spend all day monitoring their site for your images, just because you look really, really hot naked. 
   
3. Some people apologize and upload a new image that is more appropriate for a publicly viewable site.

In each of these examples, you see different ways that people responded to a particular problem, but only in the last one do you see an example of a user who is 'community-minded'.  They may not have realized that their image was a 'mature' image, but rather than complain, they chose to put the community first. 

One guy said, "That's cool. I can respect that."  He understood that we're not prudes here (far from it), but because MyBlogLog avatars show up on a variety of sites, perhaps an image of cleavage is not appropriate, even though it's far from porn.

5.  The Golden Rule
Before a user messages someone or uploads any images, I think a great question would be, "Is this something that I would want to see/read and is this something that the person I am sending this would want to see/read."

• Sure, you want to gain more viewers, but is sending out thank you messages to every person who views your profile the right way to do it?  If you were in their shoes, would you want a thank you from every site you visited online?  I think you might think that was a little creepy to have several dozen thank you emails in your inbox every time you checked your email.

• Sure, you want people to notice that picture of a hot girl on your avatar (whether or not it's you), but would you be impressed by that?  Would you click that avatar?  Agreed that you may see an attractive avatar and think it's hot, but what would be your first impression of the person who needed to resort to the 'hot chick' gimmick to make you notice them?

In my experience, bloggers who write well and actively take part in discussions tend to get noticed, and build large followings.  Bloggers that just leave "I agree" or "Welcome" comments everywhere just annoy people enough that they refuse to read their blog. If you want readers, you'll have to write content that is so darn useful that people can't live without it.

If you aren't writing content like that, then chances are that no matter how hard to message users, you still aren't going to get noticed.   Start by improving your content, and then I assure you that the 'where to find users' problem will cease to exist.

Do you have any additions to this list?  If so, send me an email to robyn@mybloglog.com and I'll pick a few to spotlight here on this blog.

MyBlogLog is a WebWare 100 Finalist

Rafe Needleman at Cnet just sent me a note letting me know that MyBlogLog is a finalist in their WebWare 100 Awards -- super cool.  We're in the Community category, with a bunch of other great services, so we're just honored to be a part of such an illustrious group of sites.

If you're so inclined, please check out the list of community nominees or heck, just click here to vote for us!