Blue Dot has in one fell swoop and has been reborn as . 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 !
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
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***: “[…] 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.”
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***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.”
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***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.”
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***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.”
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The Global Geek Podcast: “Here is some news you can use. The social bookmarking site Blue Dot, has changed it’s name to Faves.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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
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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.
