Profile - BlinkList

Update: I really like the way Microcontent Musings breaks down web services into core web 2.0 functions. While it can be a little harsh, it’s also a nice “to do” list for new companies. BlinkList is only a month old…my bet is that in another month or so they will do significantly better than 1/10.

Company: BlinkList (a MindValley company)

Launched: June 2005. Major feature release July 25, 2005

Location:

Office in San Jose, CA:
Mike Reining (Director)
MindValley LC
236 W. Rincon Ave #B
Campbell, California,
95008 USA
Tel: (650) 387 0920

Office in Kuala Lumpur:
Vishen Lakhiani (Director)
MindValley LC
Fabrikus Building
No.1, Jln 8-91,
Taman Shamelin Perkasa, Cheras, 56100
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Tel: (+603) 9283 6054

What is it?

BlinkList is a social bookmarking service built on ajax. It is very buttoned up and has some excellent features. It also has an all-star team with deep experience, led by their PR star (see team below) :-).

We’ve profiled a number of competing services lately - see Shadows, del.icio.us, Simpy, Furl, Yahoo My Web 2.0 and others.

Blinklist includes most of the features from those sites, and adds a couple of others.

Key Features:

- easy bookmarking, including a bookmarklet if you want to have one-click bookmarks
- adding “stars” to tags and bookmarks to easily find them in the future

- Blinklist will take any highlighted text on the screen and auto fill a description field with the text (this is the only service I know of that does this, and it’s incredibly useful)

- bookmarks can be private or public. You can email bookmarks to friends at the time of making them, which is also a very useful feature. TechCrunch bookmarks are here.
- permanent tag pages - see for example www.blinklist.com/tag/web2.0/ (a nested/filtered search function on general tag search would be an awesome addition - Shadows has a “narrow results” option that is very useful)
- a tag cloud for each user, as well as the entire blinklist community

- “related tags” for currently viewed tags
- “auto-complete” suggestions when tagging a bookmark
- RSS for all pages
- easy signup

see the demo here to see some of these features being used.

Overall, BlinkList is a worthy addition to the ranks of social bookmarking services, and one of our favorites. It doesn’t have the user base of del.cio.us, or all of the functionality of Shadows or Simpy, but it does have unique features that none of the others have. It could very easily get traction.

Suggested new features:

- full page caching with keyword search
- shadow-page type functionality (this is going to really help with search engine rankings for Pluck, and it’s cool).
- nested/tag filtering at all levels
- show number of people who’ve bookmared a given URI

Additional Screen Shots:

Team:

Vishen M. Lakhiani - Co-Founder
Michael Reining - Co-Founder
Kristina Mand - Book Balancer
Adelle Magsombol - Business Development Manager
Jiangti Wan Leong - Chief Web Developer
Hannu Nikupeteri - Database Engineer
Anita Patwardhan - Web Analytics and eCommerce Consultant
Amar H. Hamzeh - Code Wiz
Ozzy Labradoodle - Director of Public Relations (“When he’s not chewing on our laptop cables, he’s in charge of PR”)

Link

Additional Links: MindValley, Discussion Group, MindValley Blog, RetroType, Mad Baggage, Jill Adelle, Blended Edu, IT Sideways, strategiczero, EduBlog, Republic of Geektronica, Christian Contini

Tags: blinklist, mindvalley, delicious, del.icio.us, simpy, furl, shadows, socialbookmarking, rss, atom, web2.0, techcrunch, tags, tagging, folksonomy

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 31st, 2005 at 6:58 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.