Blue Dot has changed their name, branding and product in one fell swoop and has been reborn as Faves.com. The improved product focuses on users being able to subscribe to topics of interest and receive customized feeds regardless of whether or not that user has friends already on the system. For me personally, this is a less valuable use case than the very social sharing experience I use the site for, but the new direction does not get in the way of my existing experience at all and could be come useful when there are more people creating content in subject areas that interest me. I think this is a really smart move for the folks over at Faves (boy is it going to be hard not to refer to Blue Dot all the time) as the changes are born out of an honest assessment of where the site was seeing success and where it was facing challenges. It looks like they’re off to a great start with a very favorable review in TechCrunch!

Similar to my recent post on the navigation changes at Amazon, I thought I’d collect a page of feedback on the new Faves.com to see what people are saying about it. How the media and bloggers are responding is below:

[Last Updated: 9:13AM, November 9, 2007]
[*** - connotes noteworthy review]

Blog Coverage

• ***TechCrunch: “[...] Blue Dot’s bookmarking service has remained a favorite of ours because of their consistently innovate their interface. Today, with their re-launch as Faves.com, is no exception.”
• ***Mashable: “So will all these new changes help Faves better compete with the major players? I really like the incorporation of feed management tools, along with the other ways to manage bookmarks, and leverage the community votes.”
• ***John Cook’s Venture Blog: “Seattle social networking startup Blue Dot is scrapping its name and repositioning the service — now dubbed Faves.com — so that people can create a personalized Web page populated with their favorite news topics. For example, a Seattle Mariners’ fan who also enjoys surfing and cooking could sign up to receive information about those specific topics from other users who have bookmarked related content. That puts Faves.com in direct competition with sites such as Topix.net, Digg and Stumble Upon.”
• ***Social Media Explorer: “Is this going to revolutionize social news or bookmarking? Probably not. But I can certainly see usefulness in the approach and am interested enough to try it myself. While I’ve grown weary of social news sites – I hate asking people to Digg my submissions or vote for my stories so they’ll get better traffic – there are enough interesting angles to the user experience on Faves for me to recommend you give it a shot.”
• The Global Geek Podcast: “Here is some news you can use. The social bookmarking site Blue Dot, has changed it’s name to Faves.”
• NW Innovation: “The company said that people were confused by the firm’s prior BlueDot.us domain name, so it has changed to a more mainstream domain. The firm also said that it has upgraded its service with a major release, including personalized home pages, voting, and topic subscriptions.”
• Center Networks: “Bluedot.us has changed their name to Faves as of today. I had a lengthy call with the executives last week but idiot me left all my notes at home. I have pasted their release below as a back-up. Here is the basic idea – they changed their name to more accurately reflect what they do, the .us isn’t as “trustworthy” and they are focused around topic networks.”
• Technically Speaking: “While changing a name might help a company, in this case – Bluedot.us going to and becoming Faves.com is an attempt for them to gain some new users. I hope they are also figuring out a way to get the old users coming back. Like Allen of CN, I quit using Bluedot when it became too spammy.”

Media Coverage

• ad-hoc-news: “More than 36 percent of Web users ?highly trust? the information they receive from friends and acquaintances in their online social networks, according to a new social Internet survey by Faves.com, a social discovery and bookmarking site. The same survey found that 34 percent of respondents visit a social networking site at least weekly.”

FULL DISCLOSURE: I used to work at Blue Dot as a Program Manager.

I wish the video were more agnostic to the bookmarking services out there, but this is a great description of how/why you should use social bookmarking to store the best sites on the web.

Click To Play

If you’re interested in social bookmarking, I recommend Blue Dot!

I used to work at a social networking / bookmarking startup called Blue Dot. While searching for an old demo video we had made while there, I came across a bunch of great videos, some made by our team and some made by our users. The following are all the videos I’ve discovered so far, all on one page for posterity.

The Press

• Blue Dot on KOMO TV
• 
  Blue Dot interviewed by Robert Scoble (while I was traveling!)

Videos we made

• 
  Kabir Shahani unveiling Blue Dot at Gnomedex. A presentation which laid out a lot of our thinking about we were attempting to build.
• 
  By far, the best perk I’ve ever had at any company, Mike used to take us out wakesurfing before work on Fridays. I haven’t found anybody at Amazon doing this yet ;^(
• 
  The earliest Dot Demo. This one was created by dev extraordinaire, Derek Slager (who wrote the authoring code).

Videos our users made

• 
  Video by Robin Good. Awesome demo/tutorial with spacy mellow background music!
• 
  This one is really cool. A user gets interviewed on how to use Blue Dot.
• 
  Video by Matt Ellsworth. Demo of how to add friends on Blue Dot.

I believe that I’ve got the exclusive scoop on this new blog-posting feature from Blue Dot [you must register and get an account to currently see the set-up form] as I was one of only a couple “closed-Alpha” testers. Lucky me, I was just given the go-ahead to let people know about it, before Blue Dot has even announced it on their own blog.

As a blogger, one of my main challenges is finding the time to post frequently enough to keep my blog fresh. On the days where I don’t have much time, Blue Dot’s new feature is a great help. I can get up in the morning, read my rss, find the stuff I think my readers will enjoy, dot it, and it will show up on my blog, complete with images! No formatting madness or fuss.

Here’s a picture of my post from earlier today:

Blue Dot’s newest feature allows us bloggers to keep our sites fresh and timely with minimal effort, using any dots we’ve created during that day. It automatically takes your dots from the last 24 hours and posts them to your blog at a time of your choosing. Del.icio.us has had something like this for a while (and I’d been using it) but it’s relatively flat and lifeless by comparison. Blue Dot’s has everything that del.icio.us’s solution has, bit it includes several things I think make it significantly better:

• Images – Blue Dot’s posts to your blog include the images from your dots. Good bye lifeless bookmarks! Hello, pictures!
• Tag Filtering – Ask my friends, I dot a lot. Blue Dot let’s me pick a tag for filtering the dots I want to show on my blog. In my case, I use the tag “thepugetnews.” Anything I tag with that gets posted to my blog each afternoon.
• CSS – You can add some Blue-Dot-specific css to your style templates and control the look to a greater degree than the competition.

Like this exclusive story? Please go Digg it!

Full disclosure: I was let into the closed-Alpha because I used to work at Blue Dot and requested this feature quite a lot. I am no longer employed there but I am incredibly excited that the feature is now available. Thank you, Mohit, for taking it on!

While not generally within the theme of this blog (get used to it), today is the public launch of Blue Dot, a little startup enterprise I work at with a bunch of cool friends. We’re pretty excited to take the covers off and show it to the world, starting today with a little bit of a PR blitz.

You should try it out. Blue Dot is a great way to stay in touch with the the people that matter to you. As you browse the web, you can share anything that you find with a very simple click of a link that we put in your bookmarks toolbar. Over time, sharing all of the interesting things you’ve found builds out a really interesting representation of yourself. The site is really beautiful (if I do say so myself) and will hopefully crack the mainstream. If you try it out, I think you’ll find that it’s surprisingly social and fun to share things you discover online.

A couple of the Blue Dot folks (Kabir and Mohit) met with a local technology business writer earlier in the week. Lo and behold, we showed up prominently in today’s Seattle P-I. Booyaa!! Hello, world!

Later in the day, sometime post-5PM, Kabir will be presenting our launch announcement to the crowd of notable folks at Gnomedex 6.0, right down the street from us here in Seattle. We’re going to try and get someone to videotape that announcement. We’ll see if we can get it posted.

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