Others Online Blog

A Couple New Features

Our humble team has been hard at work all summer long, and we've just introduced a little somethin' somethin' that we hope you'll find interesting.

• reports -- for the first time, see how much you're being shown to others across the Web!
• auto-tagging -- our tools expand your profile with interest tags automagically, and give you 100% control
• new registration and profile management -- we made it much easier and available from our Web site
• more eyeballs -- we're building out our network of publishers and users. Help us (and help yourself).
• PLUS -- we're having a party in Seattle, and you're invited

All this below, so keep on reading! And please remember, this is brand new stuff so we'd love to get your feedback, bug reports, suggestions, etc.

Manage Your Profile at our Web Site

You can now manage your profile at www.othersonline.com -- without the toolbar. (Yes I know it's ridiculous we didn't offer this before.) That said, profile mgmt from within the IE toolbar is still the old one. Just use the Web site version -- it's better.

While You're There, View the New Reports

Within your profile management pages, you'll now see a nifty little chart (in the Results tab) that reports for the past week (a) how many times you were introduced to others (via the widget, toolbar, search, etc.), (b) how many times your mini-profile and full profile were viewed, and (c) the number of click-throughs to your blog or Web site.

We've said before that using the toolbar increases your visibility -- now you can see for yourself! We have a few days of data for you already, so sign in at our Web site and check it out. Then use the toolbar and see what happens. Improve your profile (we show you how), add more interest tags and you'll see even more traffic. It's the world's first person-to-person contextual/behavioral advertising network!

Automatic Interest Tagging

It's a pain to type in every single interest tag that represents you. So let us do that for you, and at the same time help you achieve even more visibility! Because the more you have in common with others online, the more interesting (and interested) they are. Once you sign in at our Web site you'll see what your profile looks like today. You can also see the interest tags we've added to your profile automagically, based on your blog (if you listed one) and/or Web browsing behavior (if you use our toolbar). And you'll see you have 100% control. That's what I'm talking about!

Just Add Eyeballs

The bigger our network of users and widget publishers, the more visibility we all achieve. Every day, more bloggers are adding our widget to their site. You should too! We've also got some deals lined up that will drive millions of daily profile views -- all relevant. That should really light this thing off. Give us a couple weeks though, ok? (Lots of work to do.)

We're Having a Party, and You're Invited

Lots of good stuff going on, so we're having a party. Nothing fancy -- a keg of beer and some pizza at our new office for our favorite others online. Wednesday night the 12th, in Seattle, at 6pm. Here's our address and a map. To get in, you've gotta tag yourself "OOParty" -- that way, we can all learn more about each other. Go on then!

Auto Tagging 101

It's a pain in the butt to tag yourself sometimes. Yeah, jotting down a list of interests takes about 10 seconds, but there is so much more depth to each of our users which we'd like to capture -- for their benefit as well as ours. The more tags/keywords associated to each user's profile, the more interesting and deep the connections we create between our users, and the more each user is "found" when relevant to other users' browsing experience.

Well, in the last week, we took our first steps to helping users tags themselves further, while not requiring any incremental effort (on their part). We're now automagically scanning each of our user's blogs each day and tagging them based on what they write about. Currently, if you associate the tags "fly fishing, Seattle" to your profile, your profile will be displayed to others who show a related interest. Now, if you also blog about fly fishing Seattle, then your rank in our system will increase. Even if you didn't explicitly associate yourself to those tags within your profile, but still write about fly fishing Seattle, we'll pick up on that and  show you to others (whereas before we wouldn't have).

The algorithms we're using are new and will certainly be tuned over time, but hey --- it's a start. The next step is to also use browsing behavior, so that repeatedly browsing content (related to fly fishing Seattle, for instance) further increases a user's rank/association to those keywords. That latter one we'll have to be careful with though, making damn sure we don't violate user trust!

I should also note that we very tightly govern the keywords and phrases around which users can connect in the first place. As we carefully expand that list of "connection keywords", we'll naturally do a better job at associating users to their content.

Update to Web Site

Ok, so hopefully it won't bite us in the ass, but we've decided to open up the widget and Firefox toolbar to the world today. People keep writing about us, and I just thought we should put what we've got out there and see what happens, even though we still don't have a lot of the critical pieces together.

People, please be kind to us! We're just getting started and the next couple months will bring about some very exciting news/features that will add significant value to our users -- much more value than we offer today.

New Widget Designs and Wizard

Mike publlished a handy dandy new "widget wizard" today, along with 3 new formats. We're not yet done with Web site edits, so it isn't publicized on our site, but we do pitch it to new users on the last page of registration. Speaking of that last page, that has been overhauled too. GAWD, it was just horrible -- looks much nicer now. We love comments and feedback!

Here are screenshots of the new widget designs:

      

Widget in Alpha Release

We're happy to report an alpha release of our new Others Online widget, upper right column. This is simply javascript that pulls relevant people/profiles from the Others Online service, and the publisher has control over who gets listed. We're still working on the wizard, which will allow publishers to change the display parameters, brand it how they like, and control the display of profiles as follows:

• Show others online who are relevant to the content.
• Show the specific profiles of those who are on the publisher's favorites list -- think of this like a blogroll on steroids.
• Show others online who have an interest in specific keywords (like show every user who is into "dirt jumping, muse, photography, myspace, 24, etc.")
• Show profiles of those who have read or are reading your blog.

As the viewer runs their mouse over the widget, a fly-out shows more information on the user, including their Web site links, username, age/gender/location, interests and online status. Each interest is clickable, taking you to a page which shows all people with that interest.

Mike's done a very cool setup wizard for TypePad, Blogger and manual implementation. We're looking for bloggers to test it and provide their feedback!! If you're interested, please contact mike AT othersonline DOT com.

We're happy to report an alpha release of our new Others Online widget, upper right column. This is simply javascript that pulls relevant people/profiles from the Others Online service, and the publisher has control over who gets listed. We're still working on the wizard, which will allow publishers to change the display parameters, brand it how they like, and control the display of profiles as follows:

• Show others online who are relevant to the content.
• Show the specific profiles of those who are on the publisher's favorites list -- think of this like a blogroll on steroids.
• Show others online who have an interest in specific keywords (like show every user who is into "dirt jumping, muse, photography, myspace, 24, etc.")
• Show profiles of those who have read or are reading your blog.

As the viewer runs their mouse over the widget, a fly-out shows more information on the user, including their Web site links, username, age/gender/location, interests and online status. Each interest is clickable, taking you to a page which shows all people with that interest.

Mike's done a very cool setup wizard for TypePad, Blogger and manual implementation. We're looking for bloggers to test it and provide their feedback!! If you're interested, please contact mike AT othersonline DOT com.

Recent Improvements

The most visible aspect to the OthersOnline service is the display of people’s pictures and profiles in the browser - through either a toolbar or simple HTML widgets. We’ve been working on tuning the relevance of member profiles that are returned by our ‘profile matching’ Web service. There are a lot of factors that can be considered in the selection and sorting of member profiles and it isn’t always obvious how to put it all together to please the viewers the most. The area we have recently been experimenting with is “how much should recent keywords of others influence the results for the current user?” The more history that is used, the more keywords are available which results in finding more people that are relevant. But with too much history being used the results may be relevant to previous pages and less relevant to the current page, especially when browsing away from one concept and into another.

We’ve examined a few approaches and just yesterday afternoon deployed an update to the profile matching algorithm which seems to provide a noticable improvement to the relevance of the results - there should be a wider selection displayed and there should be more ‘connection words’ displayed that help explain why that particular result was chosen.

That’s the good news! Now for the embarassing news - during the deployment an error crept in which prevented members from logging in. Although it was quickly detected the resolution wasn’t as fast as it should have been and we apologize to everyone that may have encountered this outage.

If you have any questions or suggestions, post a comment or send an email to me (mike@).