Facebook Connect has spread some optimism among the Facebook developers’ community. One of them is Waleed Abdulla, Founder of the software company Ninua, and developer of the Blog Networks Fb application. In the past months, the development of Friendfeed and Twitter has led people to think that the discussion had left the blogosphere. With Blog Networks, Waleed intends to bring that interaction back to the blogosphere.
Sarah Perez describes Blog Networks as a Mybloglog for Facebook. While this is a good mental shortcut, Blog Networks is a bit different for the following reasons.
In the application, to make it easy for blog readers, Waleed has developed a personalized feed reader: the feed reader shows you the latest news from the blogs you’ve subscribed to when you joined the service, and an algorithmic wizard suggests you news from similar blogs. With this reader, Waleed’s intention is to put RSS and blog search out of the way of the non-tech savvy crowd.
The advantage of sitting on Facebook is that the platform organizes its profiles by networks. This way, Blog Networks can show you the most popular blogs among students in Stanford for example. This is great for bloggers wishing to know their readership a little better, and for readers wishing to read what their peers are reading.
Overall, Blog Networks is a great way to discover new blogs. On every blog’s page, there is a related blogs section. For each blog, you can see who is reading it. On your Facebook mini-feed, you can see when a friend joins a new blog network. Blog Networks integrates your blogging activities in your daily Facebook social activities. With Facebook Connect, Waleed is planning to take those communities of blogs outside of Facebook, and bring them back inside the blogs. All that social data gathered on Facebook will be used to fuel social interactions on each blogs of the network. That part is under stealth development so far, but once it will be out, it should be a real game changer for the blogging community at large.
Read more:
Introducing the Blog Networks Facebook App 1,000 Member Challenge – Mashable
Shadow and Light – Example of alpha version of widget
Self Debugging – Waleed Abdulla’s blog
PotteryBlog.com on Facebook – Enthusiast blogger joining Blog Networks