Busy, Busy, Busy in the Background
Fear not, Blern devotees. Although things are relatively quiet here on the blog, a number of “behind the scenes” improvements have been getting attention, such as ways to improve the accuracy of your recommendations and new methods for detecting and incorporating new RSS feeds–the current total of “active” feeds is nearly at 10,000 (if this seems low, consider that I review the content and appropriateness of every feed that’s made “active” in the system).
I’ve been reluctant to try turning Blern into a social networking site, which seems to be all the rage in every Web 2.0 site out there. However, I’m beginning to see some applications where it might make sense to have some “social” features. Rather than build a new social network, I’d rather leverage technologies out there so I’ll be looking at things like OpenSocial and Facebook integration, where it makes sense.
Specifically, I’m thinking about a feature that would allow you to gauge how closely your interests align with those of your friends and discover people who have similar interests to you. I’m laying the groundwork to incorporate some more “traditional” features in Web 2.0 sites (such as integrating an address book for sharing articles). This foundation should allow me to then take the next step of autodiscovering the interests of your friends and then measuring the similarity between them, yourself and possibly others.