We are excited to announce that Blocool is making avaiable tonight its first public beta version. We’ve been developing the site and its firefox extension during the last 40 days and decided that’s time to get some friends in to try it out and tell us what they think about the whole thing.

And although we do not intend to start advertising the site to a lot of people now, we’ve chosen a public-beta over a private-beta launch so everyone who hear about us at this stage can come in and use the site.

It’s important to notice that, in this first release, the features and functionality available are just a tiny part of what we plan to build here at blocool.com. However, this tiny part is also the foundation for everything else coming next, so it’s important for us to make sure that’s working properly and that users will like it. But what is this tiny stuff we are talking about?

Right now, what Blocool does is pretty straightforward: you sign up for an account and install our Firefox extension (which will be the only browser supported for a few months) that starts watching in the background the sites that you are browsing. When you visit a blog, the extension acknowledges it and send information about the site (such as the blog name, the post title, the blog and post url) to our servers and associate that record with your account. Everything else happens on the server side.

We log your blog reading stream and assembly a personal page for you featuring all the blog posts you have read and an ordered list of the blogs you most visit, which can be embed as a widget in your blog (if you have one), replacing the traditional static blog roll full of blogs you don’t actually read. And that’s it, pretty simple. The cool part is that you don’t need to make any effort, remember to click or favorite stuff, making it easy to share your blog reading. Once you set things up, all you need to do is tell your profile url to your friends and they can get to know what blogs and posts you are reading.

Did i just mention friends? Yes i did. Bringing them into Blocool it’s the best way to engage and make things more useful. You can choose to follow (in the Twitter’s way) or become a friendship (like in facebook) with other users, and by doing that, when you sign in to our site, we show you a dashboard featuring: a timeline of the what your connections (friends and followed users) are reading in real-time; a list of unique post that have been read by more than one connection recently; and we join their blog rolls to put together an ordered list of the blogs that get most visits from them. We think that the last two features in special are a great filter to discover both new posts and new blogs that interest you.

We know that there are a lot of things missing here. We already have a development roadmap in place and expect to roll tons of improvements and new features during the next months. But for now, welcome aboard. We’re just taking off.

Tags: beta launch, blocool, hello world, welcome

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 6:32 pm and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.