Search-Powered Web Apps

What would it be like if you could search “through” a person?

Last night Lijit released our first version of Personal Network Search. We have been heads down for a month or so on a really cool strategy to make people, their online identities, and the people they know vertically searchable. It’s an amazingly powerful concept. In the following weeks we will review more about this strategy but for now you can try the concept right here on my blog.

In fact anyone can try it on their Blog if they have a Lijit account. First run our identity wizard to grab your other online personas and map them into Lijit, then turn on your Personal Network Search functionality from your Profile page.

Thanks to a cool Typepad integration you can one-click your search Wijit onto your blog..

Give it a try and shot me some feedback.. Interesting things to “Search My World” for that demonstrate the power here…

Search “me” for “tivo”
This results in a combination of bookmarks about Tivo that I have made in del.icio.us as well a entries from my blog that talk about Tivo’s.. Also mixed in there will be some hits of PVRBlog that I read on a regular basis..

Search for “Niel SAP”
I read Niels Blog Parallax and he is the most knowledgable person I know on SAP.

Search for “term sheet”
Returns a wealth of information from multiple sources close to me on building Term Sheets for startups..

Today we pushed out a few changes in our “Testarossa” release. The biggest one is the “Add other identities” page where you can link to your accounts on other services like Delicious, YouTube, and Flickr. Any content that you create on these other services will count as coming from you. In Lijit-land, this means that you not only trust this content, you are this content!

Congrats to Andy for the cool AJAX-y interface and Derek for figuring out how to mesh with all these other services.

Hello Lijitters! Today we released a new feature (as well as a few bug fixes) for your Lijitting enjoyment.

The new feature allows you to send a notification about a report to another Lijit informer (or even to someone who’s not yet a Lijit user) that’s just kind of a, “Hey, this is cool. Be sure to check it out!” message.

You can send a notification from any report, anywhere — just look for the little “send” icon displayed at the bottom of each report. When you receive a notification it’ll display at the top of your Lijit List and you’ll also get a heads-up about it via email. (If you don’t want to receive the emails, you can disable them from your Manage Account page.)

It’s a great way to make sure your friends see and share in your Lijit report discoveries!

Welcome to yet another new Lijit release! You might have noticed that I included a release name in the title of this blog post. We’re planing to name our releases after cars, as we have several automotive enthusiasts on staff. The first in this series is the “Vantage” release (named after the lovely Aston Martin Vantage), which offers the following feature goodies:

• You can now convert your Firefox and IE bookmarks into “good” Lijit reports. (If the pages were originally good enough to bookmark, aren’t they now good enough to share with your network?) It’s also nice to have everything (bookmarks, Lijit reports, etc.) together in one place. New informers will be offered the opportunity to upload their bookmarks during the process of creating an account; existing informers can upload their bookmarks from the “Manage Account” page.
• We’ve updated the look of various elements on the site. (Did you notice that the title bars in the sidebar and the title bars associated with the blocks on the right-hand side of the site are no longer black? They’re now a softer charcoal. Oooooh. Ahhhhh.) We’ve additionally prettied-up the Lijit search mark-up for Google and Yahoo! in Firefox (Internet Explorer got its search mark-up facelift in the last release), made the site resizeable width-wise, and removed the orange, cross-hatched bars along the side of the site. They’re all pretty subtle changes, but we hope they enhance your enjoyment of Lijit. We’ll continue to tweak the look of the site regularly. We can’t leave well enough alone sometimes…
• We’ve sprinkled contextual help links throughout the site. We don’t want any part of Lijit to be a mystery, so please click around and learn!
• We now support the ability to include ATOM feeds as informers in your network, in addition to the RSS and OPML feeds we support today. You can include ATOM feeds in your network through the “Add RSS Feed” page.
• We also did some testing and appear to be fully compatible with Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0. Upgrade and enjoy!

Oh, and we’re rather sorry that the site was down so long today while we upgraded. Please accept our apology for interrupting your afternoon Lijit-ing. We won’t do that again.

More good things from Lijit today! We released a few new features and enhancements into production this afternoon, which should be helpful for current (as well as potential new) Lijitters.

Sorry for the rather lengthy post. I’m the Marketing-type in this crew and have an (apparently rather irritating) affinity for using (a lot of) words. But enough about me… This release includes the following good things:

• We updated our home page (logged out) to include helpful information about Lijit, how it works and how to get signed up. We hope this will assist potential users in knowing what to expect from the service – and the sign up process – so they can get started off on the right foot.
• Along those same lines, we’ve also updated the default email invitation text and have inserted information about Lijit into the invitation-driven sign up flow. Again, we’ve done this to help newly invited users better understand what they’re getting into and how to get the most out of Lijit once they’re in.
• We hope by now that you’ve seen the new, blue ‘update the browser plugin’ badge on our website and in the browser sidebar. When we release new features that change our Lijit extension for Firefox and plugin for Internet Explorer, we want to make you aware of that…and we want you to click the badge so you can update your plugin to fully enjoy them.
• We added some great mouse-over pop-up boxes in this release. For example, hover over any report title and it’ll show you how many times that report has been clicked. Hover over any of the links in the ‘is trusted about’ subject cloud on your “My Lijit” page and you’ll see how many people trust you on each subject. Roll your mouse over everything – there’s a lot of good info to be had on the site.
• Were you concerned that many of our users seemed to have rather misshapen heads? Did you think that we were perhaps catering to a misshapen head target market? Fret not, it wasn’t them, it was us. We’ve improved our behind-the-scenes picture handling. From here on out it’s perfectly shaped heads for everyone!
• You now have unlimited email invitations. We realized that everyone you know deserves to be Lijit and didn’t want to get in the way of your making that happen.
• For those of you who have incorporated your blogs into Lijit, if you mention a URL in a given post, we’ll see that and turn it into an “informational” (i.e. neutral) report for that page. It’s just another way Lijit gets your thoughts and opinions out there for your network’s benefit and enjoyment.
• We now support OPML in the “Add RSS Feed” feature. We realize the link name is a little misleading on that. We’ll fix it soon.
• We’ve added a great feature in Firefox that displays reports about the processes running on your computer. Just click Tools > Lijit > View Processes. It’s a great way for you to know which processes running on your computer are good, bad or dangerous.
• Finally, we’re in the process of updating our Help and About text. We hope you enjoy the changes once they’re finished.

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!