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.

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This is a fairly unique product – part del.icio.us/popular and part Digg, and based on tags. On the front page of Buzz are very popular recent bookmarked sites. But there is a “Buzz” area for each tag as well. Just type in bluedot.us/buzz/[TAG] to see it. Here’s the TechCrunch page, for example.

Each page is populated based on users bookmarking and tagging a page. If enough people bookmark it, that link goes to the top of the Buzz list for that tag. As soon as another bookmark with that tag makes it over the Buzz threshold, it is added on top of the old no. 1 and pushes everything else down (like Digg). The result is constantly refreshed content relevant to a given tag. Users can subscribe to the RSS feed for that page, too.

I like BlueDot a lot because its fast and the interface is awesome. It’s one of the “companies I can’t live without” and has replaced del.icio.us as the place I bookmark web pages.

Our previous coverage of BlueDot is here.

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Seven of the companies are still on the list. Six have dropped off to make room for new products, and I’ve added two more to round out the list to fifteen total products. Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

800-Free-411

Jingle’s free 411 service has saved me a serious amount of cash this last year. They now account for over 3% of the U.S. market for information calls, and AT&T has announced that they are going to copy them. That’s good news for consumers, who have to pay up to $3.50 per 411 call today. Our coverage is here.

Amie Street

Amie Street, which launched in July, has a brilliant DRM-free music sales model. Bands upload music, which can then be downloaded for free by users. As songs become popular, the site starts to charge for it. They start at $0.01 and go up to $0.99. Users looking for popular new stuff go right to the more expensive songs. More adventurous types try out lots of new music. I’m somewhere in the middle. This free-market place to set the value of DRM-free digital music could be the future. Our coverage is here.

Ask City

Bloglines dropped off the list this year, but another Ask.com property, the recently launched Ask City, has been added. In our very subjective opinion Ask City has replaced Yahoo Maps as the best mapping product on the Internet. My favorite features are multipoint directions an the annotation tools that allow you to draw and write on a map before forwarding to friends. Ask City is less than a month old and it’s already one of our favorite apps. Our writeup is here.

BlueDot

BlueDot is a social bookmarking service that is similar to del.icio.us. I’ve started using it instead of del.icio.us becasue I like the interface better and it allows sharing of bookmarks just among friends, whereas with del.icio.us you have to choose between fully public and fully private bookmarks. The company launched in July and had an update in October.

Digg

Anyone who reads this blog knows my position on Digg, where users pick what news makes it to the home page. It’s the future of news, and the most disruptive force to mainstream media since blogs were born. Digg has to continue to battle spam while pleasing its most active users, which won’t be easy. But I use the Digg site every day. Our coverage of Digg is here.

Flickr

Flickr is our first holdover from last year’s list. In the last year we’ve seen a bunch of startups gunning for Flickr, but as of now it is still the photo tagging and sharing site that we use every day. The new geotagging feature is incredible. We’d like to see facial recognition, similar to what Ookles is doing, next. Our coverage of Flickr is here.

Flock

We’ve been fans of Flock since we first started covering it during the original Bar Camp in August 2005. It just feels like a complete ecosystem rather than the hodge podge of sometimes incompatible additional add-ons that you get with Firefox. If Flock didn’t exist I’d be a happy Firefox user, but it does, and I use it as my primary browser. The rumor is that they have a big new release coming very soon. Our coverage of Flock is here.

Gmail

Despite recent problems, I think Gmail is now at least as functional as most desktop email applications (like Outlook and Mac Mail), and darn close to perfect. The reason? Lots of storage, the ability to tag emails and the recent addition of POP access to other email accounts. All for the great price of – free.

NetNewsWire

I’ve used NewsGator’s NetNewsWire desktop feed reader from the moment I switched to a Mac in early 2006. It’s not free, but having fast and offline access to feeds was worth the $30 I paid for it. Bloglines dropped off the list because of NetNewsWire, although I expect to be moving over to Google Reader in the near future. Offline access is less important now that I have EVDO cellular access, and Google Reader made significant improvements to its product in its September upgrade.

Netvibes

Netvibes is another holdover from last year. We go there multiple times per day to get a quick overview of a few important feeds. The company continues to gain users at a torrid pace, and has plenty of money in the bank after a $15 million round earlier this year. My guess is Netvibes is fending off multiple acquisition offers at this point, and may not be an independent entity at the end of 2007. Our coverage of Netvibes is here.

Pandora

Pandora is yet another holdover from last year, and a company that we’ve covered since before its launch in 2005. My bet is that I’ve racked up more hours listening to music on Pandora than any other user – it’s almost always playing while I write. Millions of loyal users agree with me. Our coverage is here.

Skype

Skype may be the single biggest productivity booster since email. I use it as my primary instant messaging client, and of course for free on the fly calls almost daily. Skype is one of the Internet’s killer apps. Our coverage of Skype is here.

Techmeme

TechMeme is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. Stuff on TechMeme hits the New York Times and other newspapers days later. My father is as addicted to Techmeme’s political sister site, Memorandum, as I am to the technology news area. Our coverage of TechMeme is here and here.

Wordpress

We’ve been mostly happy customers of Wordpress since TechCrunch started. It’s the most flexible blogging platform, and their Akismet comment spam blocking service has saved us from nearly 1 million spammy comments. We’d have to hire a full time person just to moderate comments and trackbacks if Akismet wasn’t as good as it is. Our coverage of Wordpress is here.

YouTube

YouTube is far from being a young startup, having been acquired by Google for $1.65 billion earlier this year. And even though they sent us a cease & desist letter just two months ago, we remain YouTube addicts. Fire Engines! Bananas! Humanity is a beautiful thing. Earlier YouTube coverage is here.

Almost on the List

A few companies almost made the list as well – AllOfMP3, AllPeers, Last.fm, Meebo, Wikipedia and Zoho were right on the edge, as well as others. I just had to cut the list off somewhere.

Agree? Disagree? Tell me all about it in the comments.

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Perhaps the most interesting news about Blue Dot though is the addition of new investor Mark Zbikowski to the company’s Board of Advisors. Zbikowski is one of only a handful of people (including Gates and Balmer) to have worked at Microsoft for 25 years and he’s the designer of the DOS executable file format (.EXE). Zbikowski’s initials MZ are in the header of every .EXE file. He’s just one of many heavy hitters backing Blue Dot, other investors include former Starbucks Senior VP Don Valencia and former Microsoft Senior VP Richard Fade. It’s interesting to note that Blue Dot, a company with so many elite backers, has a non-hierarchical structure among its employees.

Blue Dot has also launched what it calls its “partner program” to allow off site publishers to place “Dot this” links after each story on their sites. That’s not unusual, but the way the company is implementing the program is important because it ought to be obvious. I think Blue Dot has implemented the most frictionless and accessible way to get new users participating in a bookmarking community that I’ve seen yet.

The key is that Blue Dot is useful to readers immediately without registering for an account. Readers who click on the Blue Dot link to save an article on a partner site see a small pop up box from which they are able to send that article by email to anyone. The article is saved in an account automatically created for them without registering for Blue Dot. A cookie on the browser associates the user with that account and an email is sent to introduce Blue Dot’s full feature set and direct them back to the Blue Dot site to read friends’ comments about the emailed item.

The pop up box keeps readers on the partner site and has a more extensive explanation of the service that appears when the top bar of the box is hovered over.

The end result is that Blue Dot is the easiest social bookmarking service to start using immediately without filling out an account registration. It mystifies me that the links for other social bookmarking services on publisher sites are useless until you’ve created an account. The code to put a Dot This button on your site is here.

This is just one of many things that aren’t necessarily uncommon but that Blue Dot is doing particularly well. They also allow users to change the colors of the Blue Dot page, import their archives from Del.icio.us and automatically Dot all the posts in their own blogs off site.

A number of new features and partnerships are in the works that if successful will integrate Blue Dot in some high profile sites around the web. This is definitely a company to watch. Microsoft spawned social networking site Wallop is better funded, but I find Blue Dot more compelling because its services seem more useful even if they are less Flashy.

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The company is made up of a 10 person team with a flat structure; no one is anyone else’s boss and the company credits this structure with much of its ability to innovate. Several of the team members came from Microsoft and Amazon. Founded in 2004, Blue Dot has 5 investors who have put in a total of $1.5 million in angel funds. Those investors include former Starbucks Senior VP Don Valencia and former Microsoft Senior VP Richard Fade.

The basic premise of the system is that users can tag items into their online archives and befriend other users to share access to part or all of their items saved. The real differentiation, however, is found in the feature set.

Access Other social bookmarking services let you mark items as either public or private. Blue Dot allows you to create groups and only share certain items with members of those groups. Group members can subscribe to those feeds in any feed reader that supports authentication. Authenticated RSS feeds aren’t an advertised feature, this first version of Blue Dot is aimed primarily at nontechnical users, but it’s very nice. The ability to set different access settings to different groups is substantially more sophisticated than most consumer facing online social bookmarking services.

Images Images from the pages you bookmark are autopopulated in Blue Dot. Part of your pop up box for tagging is a field to click through images from the page until you find one you want to select for inclusion in your archive. I’ve seen a few other systems do this, but not many. It is smooth and makes for a great user experience compared to the text-dense look of most social bookmarking services.

Comments Blue Dot lets friends leave comments in response to items you’ve bookmarked. That’s not completely unique, but it’s a good feature that’s far from universal. The fact that comments are limited to your friends will cut down on unhelpful feedback, they say. Could go either way, I think.

Widget Offering a widget to syndicate the feed of your recent bookmarks is becoming a best practice for social bookmarking services – but most are in javascript and are ugly. Blue Dot has a relatively attractive widget and offers a version in Flash. That means it can be used in MySpace. That’s a big deal. The company says they’ll be building this up even more in the short term future.

Search Social bookmarking + social networking works especially well when it comes to search. Blue Dot’s search feature lets you choose whether you want to search inside your archive, your friends’ or all users’. If you search inside your friends’ archives and find less than 10 results then the system will round out the top ten results with items from all users. I’ve always enjoyed the feature at LookSmart’s Furl.net that searches inside my bookmarks, the bookmarks of all users and from the web at large. Blue Dot takes a similar concept to the next level.

There are still some problems I have with Blue Dot. The company tells me that the ability to communicate directly by email or IM with my friends in Blue Dot will be added soon. I hope so, because the system is frustrating to use socially without it.

A del.icio.us importer will be available soon, Blue Dot says. Export is something they are thinking about how to implement. Open Identity standards? No comment yet, the topic has only been the subject of casual discussion in the company so far.

Another thing that bothers me about Blue Dot is that they put a trademark on the phrase Social Discovery! The company says they did that because they don’t want to be branded as a social bookmarking service and they hope to be a pioneer in this new space. I don’t buy it; I think that’s just obnoxious and they should drop it.

Nonetheless, I think Blue Dot really is a pioneering service. I’m glad I didn’t publish the nasty review I originally wrote.