Blogfriends, the Facebook application for adding blogs to your Facebook feed, plans to come out of beta next Monday with a full launch, promising to do something to monetise blogs in a way they haven’t been before [Update: they now say they won't 'monetise' for a while yet and the app will be available from here]. It’s a tall order, but there’s something about privately-held i-together and its CEO Luke Razzell which gives me a hunch that they may just do something interesting. Why do I think that? Blogfriends is a smart app inside Facebook which attempts to mashup up your interests with your social network in order to bring you only the blog posts that you want to read. It’s a slick application and I’m told the feedback from users I know has been pretty good. The other reason is that Razzell - who I have met a couple of times at business events - has an almost academic, granular insight into the concept of identity - something you will also pick up from reading his own blog and that of I-Together’s. If Facebook is about anything, it’s about identity, which is what suggests that Blogfriends may be up to something interesting. I don’t for a moment think it will replace the big heavyweight feed-readers like Google Reader of course. But it may do a lot to make RSS and feeds more mainstream via the mainstream audience in Facebook.





I think this will be a textbook case of building a (low cost) beta app on Facebook then rolling it out bigger and farther. Good luck, Luke.
I think FB apps are starting to get a bit spammy - even the genuinely useful ones
@mike, alan: thanks
Of course we hope Blog Friends *will* replace your conventional feed reader. I know I’m biased, but I use Blog Friends about 10x more than I do google reader - purely because it always supplies me with something new and interesting to read as well as more familiar blogs. Actually, come to think of it I only use the google app now when I’m on the train - and even then it’s mostly to read my Blog Friends stream.
@drew
Hopefully you’ve never been spammed by Blog Friends. If so, tell me what you are unhappy with and we’ll look into it. We’ve worked really hard in Version 1 to ensure people don’t have to invite friends before using the app etc - so hopefully you’ll not find it spammy at all.
Jof Arnold, i-together (Blog Friends)