MyBlogLog needs to learn some web manners December 6, 2007
Posted by jay in : Social Media, User Experience , trackbackA few days ago I responded on the Snap blog to a post on Read/WriteWeb and explained why Snap Shots is the most popular semantic application in the world. One of the applications mentioned in the RWW post is SmartLinks by AdaptiveBlue. As I wrote in my post, it looks very-very-very similar to Snap Shots.
Less than 24 hours after my post hit the wires, I received an email from MyBlogLog notifying me that I was added to a community that I “have shown repeated interest in: adaptiveblue”. Well, it’s always a good practice to follow the competition, but to be added without my permission to a community I have no interest to be part of, and to be notified after the fact - that’s brutal and rude!
Think about it this way. Amazon has one of the best recommendation engines on the web. Can you image that a recommended product automatically gets added to your shopping cart just because you visit the product page once or twice…
MyBlogLog should change this features in two ways:
- Implement some web manners and change this feature to be permission based (opt-in)
- Tune the Recommendation engine so it won’t jump to conclusions and suggest me a community just because I visited the site once or twice. A repeated interest means at least three times. But again, this should just be a suggestion.
December 7th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Good point. You’d think that the concept of “joining” a community would be based on some type of explicit action taken by the user. It might be nice if they would simply change their strategy from auto-add to simply auto-invite. At the furthest extreme, the feature makes me imagine a community with millions of members who have no idea the community even exists.
On a side note, I hovered over the link referring to the Snap blog in the post above to check out the Snap Shot. One thing struck me about the advertising in the Snap Shot - it showed me an ad to dl Windows Vista. This is particularly interesting because I happen to be on a Mac with Leopard browsing with Firefox. I’m sure my setup fits the profile of a user who is likely the absolute least interested in Windows Vista.
December 8th, 2007 at 3:26 am
When you register for MyBlogLog, one of the check boxes on the registration page is for the auto add to communities feature. The default is to add you automatically after 10 pageviews of a site. This can be changed at any time by editing your profile and selecting either a higher value or turning it off completely and joining communities manually.
The “Hot in My Communities” personalization on your profile page is driven by the communities that you join and the more you join, the better it gets. For this reason, we encourage everyone to use the automated community add feature.
If this isn’t your style, you can simply turn this feature off. We won’t be offended
Best,
Ian
Product Manager, MyBlogLog
December 10th, 2007 at 10:42 am
Ian,
It was not easy to find that option. I had to scan the 8 tabs under “My Account” several times until I found it at the bottom of the first tab. Also, are you sure the 10 page views rule works as intendend?
What might help is a “What’s this?” link next to that option.