layout: post title: Blogware adds Friends and Address Book created: 1081750713 categories:

• Social Media

Blogware users got a small preview of version 1.0 this week with the release of our new Address Book and Friends functionality.

The Address Book is a pretty cool mechanism that provides Blogware Publishers with some pretty nifty tools for managing the relationships between users and content.

The other new function, Friends, is a simple tool that allows users to connect with one another and will act as the basis for a bunch of cool new services as we move forward.

Random Bytes: New Features: Friends & Addressbook

Ross, where do you want feedback? Is there a central spot for development feedback, feature requests, etc.? The Blogware Blog doesn't seem to have an obvious spot for this.

I don't have a Blogware-powered test blog anymore, but I do have a "reader account" (anyone can have one of these) and I have posting privileges on a private blog used by StreamLine.

So I tried out Friends. It's not a site, it's a part of Blogware itself. My first complaint is the very basic nature of describing your relationship to other people: you're a friend or you're not. I hate this, and so do many other people. So far, I still think Flickr has the best model for this.

Blogware's user accounts system have always reminded me a bit of LiveJournal. The addition of social-networking-like "friends" features makes sense. Or you could choose to see it more like TypePad's upcoming authentication service, TypeKey. By whatever name, it's still profiles and identity management, which means I want to be able to synch and export those details with other systems.

I think you need to have a full Blogware account to see the Address Book feature (BTW -- I do like that Blogware has decided on, well, regular names -- people know what these things are). My account still allowed me to enter details for my address. Notably, it had home and work as separate entries, with separate permissions for each one (the permissions are "Private", "Friends only", and "Public"). Of course, this points to my problem with this single Friend/not-Friend binary -- I will want to share my business details with "business" acquaintances, but not necessarily my home details.

On my To Do list is a longer review of what Blogware has to offer. Of course, this is all ahead of a v1.0 release, so I'm looking forward to what else gets added in the meantime.