There are dozens of bookmarking services out there, but most are eclipsed by the size of Delicious. However, Blue Dot’s bookmarking service has remained a favorite of ours because of their ability to consistently innovate their interface. Today, with their re-launch as Faves.com, is no exception.
The relaunched site adds features making their bookmark database more relevant and easier to use for anti-social bookmarkers. At the core, it has the same social and privacy features of the old Blue Dot. However, they’ve added a new method of finding trusted links that doesn’t require building yet another social network. The new site adds a topic network that does a lot of the networking and recommending implicitly along with an easy-to-use feed reader for sorting through new links. It’s kind of like Digg and Delicious combined with Google Reader.
The topic network lets users follow and contribute to clusters of links by subject (software, business, Apple, etc.). When submitted, links are categorized by their system and ranked by a score similar to Digg. The score for each link is based on the number of votes, the “karma” of the submitter, and implicit votes such as the number of clicks a link has. Users whose links are more popular in a category, have higher karma.
Users can subscribe to these topics via RSS or through the site’s new link reader. The reader is like a specialized Google Reader for your bookmarks, which can be sorted by popularity, time, and read/unread. Each link lets you easily vote up ones you like or share them with friends. As you scroll through the links, they are marked read and moved out of sight for the next time you return. The reader makes it very easy to sort through dozens of new links in the time it would normally take me to review a few.
The URL change is also part of the Seattle based companies effort to gain greater reach, which they felt was slowed by the relative obscurity of a .us domain. While the site has attracted a significant audience of over 1.1 million visitors a month, the growth rate has stayed fairly level. They’re making a big bet that the new features and .com domain will give a boost those numbers. All in all, they look to be off to a smart start.
Tired of so many bookmarking sites(no matter how you discover new things). Diigo works for me just fine. It has annotation, save anywhere else, share/forward features in one toolbar. Yeah it is more than what delicious does.
Faves.com is just mixture of delicious and digg.
Their new .com domain name is so much better than their previous .us name. Shows that they understand a little something about domain names. Surprised they took this long to make the name switch.
That first paragraph reads like it was written by a seven year-old on meth.
@Tito - So if I give my seven year old meth he’ll be able to write for TechCrunch? Does Ritalin count? That’s kind of like meth.
I love Bluedot, and I use it all the time. Now they are Faves.com. It’s much easier to remember and type. I wonder how much they paid for the domain. At least $10,000 dollars?
I agree we waited to long to change domain names. We were “in love” with our old brand name - mostly because the terms “dot” and “dotting” were pretty easy to incorporate into your everyday vocabulary (kind of like “googling” has become for everyone else).
But the non-dot-com domain is a pretty major barrier for any site wanting to reach a broad internet population (I’d never recommend any startup start off with a .net or .us domain, for example).
We tried very hard to get bluedot.com - but it was just too expensive (un-motivated domain owner).
I feel fortunate to have found a 5-letter .com that’s very appropriate to what Blue Dot was doing … and for LESS than $10,000.
The second half of this story will be - how well does Google get our PageRank moved over to the new domain? That will take some weeks to play out.
Mike Koss
Faves.com
Bluedot has always been best-of-breed technically and functionally - it will be great to watch them build up the audience and community that the product deserves!
I love the new name. Its much catchier.