We pushed some new code to the site today with a few enhancements, mostly under the hood. Some people were being served an empty Lijit list, or may have intermittently seen no reports in their “My Reports” page. These issues should be fixed now. As usual, if you notice anything strange, please report a bug via the link at the bottom of lijit.com pages (the “footer”).

On the user side, looking at the chains of trust or blockage on a user page has been enhanced a bit to show blocking connections or identity connections (when you add an RSS feed to the system and click the “This is me” checkbox, you’re making an identity connection). So, for example, if an informer is blocked for you, you can go to their user page to see who is blocking them in your local network.

Also, if you haven’t checked lately, take a look at the “Lijit Wijits” link in the footer - we’ve got a Wijit for your blog or webpage that can help you more easily build up a network of trusted informers, which means more relevance for you!

Wow, what happened to the last 6 months of my life?

In April I ejected out of Raindance Communications where I was the CTO and Co-founder after 8 years of going from 1 dude in a room (me) to 450 people….back to 250 people (it was the bubble, give us a break, we survived). Raindance was a decidedly Web 1.0 company. I define Web 1.0 companies as companies where you looked at what had been done for last 100 years or so (the phone for instance) and did a File->Replace on the word “wire”, or “circuit”, or “transaction” and substituted “IP”. Not a lot of thought, just a new transport that was more ubiquitous (Web 1.0 word). It was what it was and it has its place in 1 minute of internet history. File->Close.

Now, File->New. Except it’s not exactly “file new”. I was fortunate to find a new partner. His name is Stan James and for all practical purposes he is the father, founder, and certainly spiritual leader of Lijit Networks. As you have no doubt read by now, Lijit was Stan’s Masters Thesis in his recently completed (err, completing) Masters Program. Stan is passionate about Lijit. He lives and breaths social [insert word of choice here]. He is also the CTO of Lijit. I call Stan the crazy professor, although he would point out he is NOT a professor. Close enough for me. He has without a doubt digested the Web 2.0 world and has some opinions.

About four months back Stan and I decided to take a run at Lijit. First was the mind-numbing name change, “name-game”. We looked at, researched, talked about three hundred names. Most sucked. Stan was adamant that the “name would come to us”. I, being a first time CEO of this new ship, just wanted to get on with it. The combination of ultimate patience and nervous impatience resulted in Lijit. To be fair, Leslie our keeper-of-lists and “that looks jinky” person came up with the gem. We all loved it immediately, it cost us $9 dollars, and the rest is history.

About 2 months ago we funded the company. This was done through the not too graceful leveraging of friends of family. Most happily wrote checks, muttering something about Vegas having free drinks. Others… took longer to convince.

About 1 month ago, the team, all 8 of us, locked ourselves in our un-cool, we aren’t-exactly-in-boulder offices, and started hacking away on code. We were lucky to have a few tried-and-true Outfoxed followers imported directly from Germany to help us. Carsten, “It’s time for another sandwich” and Fabian, “We shouldn’t do screen shots from my Mac”. Both really capture the heart of what several hundred loyal followers of the Alpha version already knew, there is something cool here and we must show it to the world.

So, here we are. That’s it for history. Going forward I will bring you thoughts more on the big story of Lijit. Stan will likely draw you network diagrams and simultaneous equations of how social networks work. The team will run as hard as they can. Your job is to give it a try and give us feedback. There are some cool concepts in here. Others need work. We want all that feedback!