Lijit

Yesterday, we released the ability for people to have more than one account under a single profile. Yet, we decided that just wasn’t good enough. “No,” we said, “there must be more!”

We huddled together (we often huddle) and thought about options.

Many of the options were just untenable. We thought about having all of our search results in Comic Sans.

Quickly, we realized that wasn’t a great idea.

After a little while, it dawned on us.

“We should integrate Wordpress comments!” (After all, “wordpress” is our #1 search result internally, and we have a kick-ass wordpress plugin.)

A cry rose from our huddle…

(I think one of the developers might have actually cried, but I am certainly not one to to mention any names)

…and away we went. Now along with our integrations of Disqus, JS-Kit, Intense Debate, if you are using the default Wordpress comments, you will find a nice link in the lower left that will expose a few of the comments on the post, and a link to view more comments.

With the inclusion of Wordpress comments (even Wordpress.com comments, which is ironic since *cough* Automattic wont allow us to be installed on their Wordpress.com platform *cough*) our publishers can see the direction we are going with our feature set.

Our mission is to expose the expertise and influence of our publishers to their audience by surfacing more of the blogger’s content to their readers. It is clear that OnceUponAWin.com has great 80’s nostalgia content, and a passionate user base making them experts on, well, Shrinky Dinks.

As a user, there is nothing you need to do to have your Wordpress comments surfaced. They will automagically appear within results as of today on bloggers who are using our backend search.

More integrated content; more understanding of bloggers by their audience; more surfaced expertise and influence.

Seems like a win for everyone.

Here it is, the third day of a three day weekend and (perhaps because it is Monday), I have Lijit on the brain. This holiday weekend has been a good one for us, with new publishers such as Chris Pirillo, Duncan Riley and Dave Zatz (who runs a great TiVo blog. Todd, you can thank us later) giving us a whirl.

Side note: For all you aspiring business development people out there, getting someone to try your stuff is the easy part. Making sure they are happy with the product and feature set is the hard part. We like the hard part at Lijit.

We even got mentioned in a couple of blog posts, with a real comprehensive review from Louis Gray himself.

And, in all the flurry of activity, one line of Louis’ post seemed to sit in my brain:

[...] essentially acting like FriendFeed in reverse, not looking for one site to track my activity, but instead a search point to analyze all my activity around the Web.

One of the hottest spaces online right now is the social aggregator space, with companies like FriendFeed, Socialthing, Profilactic and others taking the lion’s share of the buzz.

Friendfeed, who is the clear leader offers a multitude of ways to slice and dice the aggregated social data from yourself and your friends, including a search function that can drill down by service or relationship (friend or yourself).

But still, its like drinking from a firehose.

I get an RSS feed of the ~150 people’s feeds (plus my own) that I monitor. Even with Twitter “hidden,” I still get an average of 500 updates to that RSS feed daily.

Frankly, a firehose of data.

And I love it. I am a consumer of data. Robert Scoble (another Lijit user) is THE example of a person that can drink from a firehose of data and pull out the pieces that are inherently interesting, not only to him, but to others as well.

Which brings us to Louis’ comment.

What if instead of passively looking for information (which is what watching FriendFeed is really doing), I want to know everything that one person (and his trusted sources) has written about a topic? Enter Lijit.

Lijit is a social aggregator like FriendFeed and the rest, we just dont open that data to the end user. Rather, we say, “Know someone you trust? Come to them with a search query, and we will find everything they and their trusted sources have blogged, photographed, videoed, or said about the topic and return only those results to you.”

In essence, what Lijit does is drink from the firehose for you, and return just a glass of your favorite information to you. (Yes, with no backwash.)

Want an example? OK, here we go…

I want to know about Link Baiting. I know Micah (being that I am Micah) was a pretty good SEO back in the day, so I go to LearnToDuck (my favorite blog of course) and using Lijit, do a search for “link baiting.”

Turns out that I havent written much about linkbaiting, only one article which is really not that interesting, so I click on the My Network tab…and what do I find? Gobs of results from people Micah trusts:

And for comparison, here is the same search done in FriendFeed:

At the end of the day, FriendFeed is a wonderful tool that I use daily.  I find it feature full and informative, especially when I want to understand what is going on right now.

But, when I want to see the photos that Robert took on his last trip to Yosemite, or that one YouTube video Chris made a few weeks back, or posts from people that Micah trusts around linkbaiting, Lijit is really the best utility out there.

The punchline? Well, it depends on what you are attempting to do, but my general rule is:

When I want to drink from the social media fire hose RIGHT NOW, FriendFeed is where it is at; and when I want to sip [find relevant data] from the social media fire hose, I find Lijit is the right utility for the job.

And, yes, I cant wait until we launch FriendFeed support (coming soon!) so you can get the best of both worlds…

Over the past month or so, we have been working with several companies to better integrate their content into our results.

We recently improved the integration of Flickr and YouTube and have continued down this path, by adding six additional content sources.

Initally, most of the integrations make it easier for us to index that content, but over the next few months, we hope to bring some interesting innovations to the results themselves (see this post for a sneak peak.)

So what are the content sources? Glad you asked (in alphabetically order, and in their own words):

Disqus - “Disqus, pronounced discuss, is a service for blog comments. Disqus enables bloggers to make the conversations on their blogs more interactive and manageable. Our distributed comment system connects readers across blog communities, while empowering publishers in promoting their content.”

Intense Debate - “Intense debate is a comment replacement service for blogs. Intense Debate increases the interactivity of blog comments driving more reader engagement. In addition, Intense Debate tracks your comments, and the comments of your friends, across all blogs helping publishers be discovered.”

Mixx - “At Mixx, all of the content is user-generated, which means that we don’t have an editor who decides what you should find interesting. We figure that you can find that same-old same-old pretty much anywhere else. So instead, we make it easy for you to submit stories, photos, videos—whatever you find interesting, informative, different or fun. You can also see—and vote on—the stuff that other Mixxers submit.”

Tumblr - “To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks. You can also look at tumblelogs as slightly more structured blogs that make it easier, faster, and more fun to post and share stuff you find or create.” (Note: If you have a custom domain for your tumblr, enter it as a blog or URL. We are still working through some minor things.)

Viddler - “A fresh, creative web application that allows you to upload, enhance, and share digital video easily and quickly inside your web browser.”

Vimeo - “Simply put, Vimeo is the home for videos you make. You can use Vimeo to upload and share videos with anyone, watch great videos, meet new people, and explore Vimeo the way you want to.”

So, there you have it. Six new content sources. We are planning on continuing to add new sources every month or so.

Have a source you would like us to add? Please leave a comment, and we will start the process.

At Lijit, we are constantly developing and testing new features for the product, the search results and the re-search box.

Recently, we have begun to explore the concept of including Flickr thumbnails within the search results themselves. Pretty cool idea, right?

What we cant come to a final decision on is exactly where the thumbnails should be placed. So, we are asking our users for feedback.

Here are the choices:

Here are the thumbnails on the LEFT (click the picture to expand):

Here are the thumbnails on the RIGHT (click the picture to expand):

And, here is a quick poll to help us figure this out. The cool thing about this quiz, is you can cut and paste it onto your blog, and share it with your friends. Check it out and thanks for the help!

The Lijit team spent five days in Austin recently at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference. Most people are familiar with the music and film portions of SXSW, but if you’re a tech geek, then the Interactive portion of the conference is like Disneyland. But better because there’s free booze everywhere. Between Todd, Micah and myself, we were able to cover a lot of ground in Austin. After some reflection, I present my favorite moments from South by (which is what all the cool kids call it):

• Seeing Lijit publishers in action

Everywhere I looked at SXSW, I saw familiar names and URLs. Having the chance to thank users and speak with them firsthand about what they want from Lijit was priceless. I went to a session on building community and one of the speakers, Jake McKee, the Community Guy, was proudly wearing a Lijit t-shirt. Bestill my beating evangelistic heart!

• Blog Network Camp

b5media organized this event and Lijit was proud to be one of the sponsors. There was a great turnout and we enjoyed meeting Darren, Aaron, and Christina, among others. Todd gave an impressive demo of Lijit and the response from the bloggers at the event was positive. We’re looking forward to seeing how we can make network search even better!

• How to piss off a blogger

I attended this discussion on blogger relations and was pleased to find out that I don’t do any of the things we listed as ways to piss off bloggers. I’m self-taught and it’s taken me a year, but I feel that I’m in a position to contribute a lot to these panels. As I’ve always said, if you treat a blogger like you’d like to be treated, you’re probably doing the right thing. To read more about what we came up with, check out the post written by the session moderator.

• Hanging in da Bloghaus

This was the place to be to meet anyone who is anyone in the blogging world. Interviews were going on left and right, blog posts were frantically typed, free beer was consumed…and all with the energy and enthusiasm of a frat house. The Bloghaus is where I made the most connections, met the most Twitter friends and rubbed shoulders with the most A-listers. A very dangerous place for someone who freaks out around (very) minor celebrities!

• Startup Metrics for Pirates

Todd spoke on a panel about different ways of measuring the growth of your startup. While the panel spoke with knowledge and experience, it was also a great panel because they spoke like pirates. There were costumes, interactive pirate crowd comments and lots of “Yarrr”ing. Who knew seeing Todd with an eyepatch and earring would be one of the highlights of SXSW?

• The people
  

Duh. Everywhere you went, there was potential for inspiration and connection. Something about the mellow Austin mood must have rubbed off, because I had no problem walking up to anyone, regardless of their page views, and starting a conversation. It was such an electric energy, matching avatars to faces and meeting new friends. (Micah went as far as getting a permanent souvenir of the time in Austin.) You hear people say it all the time in the online world, but honestly, it really is all about the people.

You can read more about Todd’s SXSW experience here and here. Micah wrote about some lessons he learned and posted a round-up of how Colorado’s startups were represented at the event.

We get emails all the time from Wordpress.com users saying they want to add the Lijit Wijit to their blog. We had no problem getting all hooked up at Typepad. They were glad to have more options for their publishers. But so far we haven’t cracked the code with Wordpress yet.

The last email we got back from them essentially said as soon as we were “cool kids” they would consider us. This is all too eerily similar to my high school experience, and with the prom approaching I’m hoping we get a date soon.

Until then, we work with every other platform in the world so give them a try. Or if you are a happy Wordpress.com user shoot them an email and say we are cool. Until then we are hanging out at the mall texting each other.