I had a great time talking with Ian Kennedy of Yahoo! and MyBlogLog about we’re using their API to accelerate community building. Ian and the team at MBL are pushing the envelope on open-ness with their API strategy. (Also, they have some cool new MBL stickers — they say “You are what you feed” and they’re bright green.) Annnyway, their API let’s you get a ton of info on your visitors and community members, if you have their “recent visitor” widget installed . What we discuss is how we use that data to make it easier for MBL visitors to jump-start community building, by recognizing users people and giving them access to their content, wherever it was created. Here’s the interview:

Think about it — what percentage of your visitors are already a member of an online community, or have a profile on another site? The key is being able to tap into those other networks and activate those users on *your* site.  Got a question, idea or comment about this type of API integration? Please chime in!

Today, we are introducing our thingfo platform. By introducing, I mean blogging about it and launching a new site at http://www.thingfo.com, while moving the Thingfo community app to http://things.thingfo.com, where it lives on and will get more attention in the future.

What is the Thingfo platform? It’s a widget and API system that enables successful websites to activate users, embed activity and community on their sites in their own look and feel, and let’s the site visitors publish content to the next generation of social networks. The result: an integrated community, contributing content and broadcasting across networks.A key facet of our platform is that it encourages visitors to contribute based on their experiences with our partner site’s content– in the real world and on the partner’s site. The Thingfo platform is also designed to help our partners leverage the new social networks but maintain control over their brand and user experience, with minimal development time and effort. You’ll be able to see it in action soon on our first partner sites.

Today, with the growth of social networks and increasingly open API’s across dozens of sites, a focused website or application doesn’t necessarily need to “build” a community.  What they need to do, is find the community they already have, and help that community connect, create, and share content.

If you’re thinking about how the new generation of social networks could activate your community, contact us.  And if you’re not thinking about this, but you think you should be, contact us.

Good times. — we’ve just launched an integration with Pownce. Why? Besides the great name? “Pownce”. Just sounds good. Beautiful design. Lively community. Works great. So now, if you want to talk about a particular ‘thing’ on Thingfo, you can send an update to your Pownce account, and keep your friends over there in the loop. We also added a little targeted search for Pownces and Twitters on our thing pages. Go to a thing, and you can check for the latest updates, start a topical conversation, or find people with similar interests.

Check it out, have fun. But don’t Pownce too hard.

If you’ve come to the site and happen to be a MyBlogLog user, you’ll notice that we just integrated the MyBlogLog API into the service. What this means is that we can recognize public MyBlogLog users and if that’s you, it’s even easier to join. But that’s just the first benefit of our ability to tap into this really great pool of data.

We can also recognize MyBlogLog recent readers, and with the API, those readers now get a “reader profile” on our site, with your profile info from your MyBlogLog account, even your contact list. Here’s where it gets even more fun. If a MyBlogLog reader profile has feeds for Flickr, Yelp, Upcoming, or Last.fm, you or members can view those feeds and import the feed items as “things”. It is a nice way to add more things, and to find out what you have in common with other users.

As an example, I was browsing profiles and came to Jeff Clavier’s reader profile. I click on “import photos” for the Flickr feed, and see that he took a picture of a Search Sig meetup I attended. Although we haven’t met, he’s connected to a few of my contacts, and I just found something we have in common. Cool! I can add him to my contacts on MyBlogLog, and maybe we’ll connect on Thingfo.

Note that not all the MyBlogLog profiles have feeds attached, and we are working to connect the data from their API to our service more deeply.  Despite this lack of perfection, the new open-ness coming to social networks is really exciting.  It’s going to make it easier to connect and share data across sites, and this is just one small example of what we’ll be able to do. Check it out, and please let us know of any ideas or requests related to this new feature and the ability to look at content from relevant feeds.

We’ve also made a few other changes, all to make the service easier to use: for example, we simplified forms for adding comments and experiences to things.  Also, if you’ve activated Twitter integration, you can now control what you send to Twitter on a per-post basis.   These were both requests from our early users, and they definitely help the site… so thank you, enjoy the new MyBlogLog integration, and please keep the feedback coming!

Kristen Nicole of Mashable just wrote a great post on our new “update from Twitter” feature.

Kristen perceptively says: (my emphasis)

Thingfo had already planned on Twitter integration, such updates [to Thingfo] could be sent in from Twitter. Equally as important, it allows Thingfo to have mobile integration as well. As I previously noted, Thingfo has an interesting take on micro-blogging…

Now, go read the whole article! Many thanks to Mashable for the coverage, and props to Kristen who’s been doing extensive coverage of the social tools space. Looking at her posts, I think she sleeps less than the startups she covers.

We just released another way for you to update any Thing on Thingfo! As the title of the post says, you can now use Twitter to update any Thing, from your favorite web app, or from your cell phone or mobile device. There are tons of possibilities, now that you can update Things wherever you are.

Here’s just one example: Let’s say you’ve added your favorite neighborhood coffee shop as a Thing. Next time you’re there, you can send a text to @thingfo and update the coffee shop with an experience, a comment, or both… and connect with the community you’ve created live and in person.

Or, you’re a teacher. You want to interact with an auditorium full of students, and you want to archive the responses and share them with the room. You’d create a Thing on Thingfo, maybe it’s “Lecture 3: The Rise and Fall of Rome”. Your students can send their questions, comments, and experiences to your Lecture 3 page, whether they are sitting in the classroom in person, or watching a video broadcast on the web.

Here is a page with the details on how to update any Thing from Twitter. You’ll also notice a new module on the upper right corner of the Thing pages with info on how to update that specific Thing.  Please note: it will take about a minute for your update to go from Twitter to your Thing.

We’ll continue adding new ways to create and update info for your Things. Please let us know of any questions, comments, or issues you have with the new feature!

I also want to thank all the users for their suggestions and feedback to date. We’ve just released a bunch of bug fixes and tweaks, and are working on more. Quick summary: You can now find an “add thing” button on any page, in the top right of the nav bar. (Thanks toddsampson!). We’ve labeled the said/did toggle more clearly at the bottom of the Thing page (Thanks johnsampson!). We put more people and Things on the front-page, and show more of your network activity on your page (Thanks gregc!). We’ve changed our handling of form tokens to make sure you can easily add content. (Thanks hipsmart). We’re working on more of your suggestions and will release them as soon as possible.

Please, keep the suggestions and feedback coming, and enjoy the new ability to update Things from anywhere!

Hey there! I’m happy to announce that we just opened Thingfo up to the public, with a bunch of new features. What’s new? First of all, you can now associate your Thingfo and Twitter accounts, and send your Thingfo updates over to Twitter. Thingfo sends a formatted post into Twitter with a link back to whatever *thing* you’re talking about. This is a way to add context and create community about whatever it is you’re talking about. (Soon you’ll be able to create posts via Twitter and add data to specific things, with our “from Twitter” inbound parsing.)

You’ll also notice that you can set up notification preferences for when you receive emails (if people add to your things, or you add the same experience as someone else, which we call “serendipity”.) Also new is a feature dubbed, “With who?” When you add something new, we ask you “with who?”. Tell us and we’ll send an email to your friend to confirm, and if they confirm, we add their experience. It’s an easy way to get your friends in on the action.

Speaking of friends, I had coffee a couple days ago with Todd Sampson (profile) and Eric Marcoullier, MyBlogLog cofounders (and fonts of incredible internet-product-and-marketing-wisdom). They pushed me for a release time and date, which we decided would be today, Tuesday at 1pm. Happily, the site was up and ready last night, when Kristen from Mashable came and reviewed it. (Talk about being on top of your industry, she got the site before the launch time!)

Thingfo is a new site that lets you build small communities around things or events that are going on in your life. The premise of these things and events comes in the form of “updates” where you get 30 characters to say what’s going on. Think of it as extreme microblogging, where the result is a formatted type of Twitter that makes groups around updates instead of the other way around. At the most basic level, what Thingfo is doing is gathering up all sorts of data about you as a person, and making connections accordingly.

As she observed, Thingfo is all about helping people share info and make connections based on who they are and what they’re doing. I really like that Kristen referrred to using Thingfo as “extreme microblogging“.

Here’s some additional rationale for the “extreme microblogging”, where we prompt users to add very short experience tags for things: I love sites like Yelp where you can go and see incredibly rich and personal reviews of local businesses and restaurants. Many people, however, don’t have the time or inclination to write a review or a blog post, or even leave a lengthy comment. However, they may just tell you that they “ate there”, got the car fixed at”, or “voted for” a certain politician. This information is useful between friends, and between a larger community of people. Using Thingfo, you can add to the pool of knowledge around well, anything, and share what you’re doing, or what you observed. Sharing connects you to others, and when lots of people focus on the same thing, the resulting mass of tiny bits of info can add up to something very powerful.

Thanks go out everyone who’s tested the site, provided awesome feedback, and for the new people trying it out. Enjoy!

The title for this post makes me think of, “No soup for you!” but really it’s just the opposite. New design for you!

We just launched some design changes to the main “thing” page, based on what our test users asked for. The feedback was pretty consistent and I think the new design highlights what Thingfo is about — making it easy to attach and view data to things, in an open and social context.

We also made a bunch of minor changes, based on suggestions and bug reports. Thanks again to everyone who is trying out the service, please let me know what you think about the changes.  In the meantime, I am going to start doing the opposite and see what happens.

A quick post to say “Thank you!” to the initial group of friends trying out Thingfo during our testing phase. In our first week, we’ve fixed a bunch of little bugs, and most importantly, gotten great feedback and ideas. Please keep ‘em coming. I’m inviting more people and look forward to more ideas, while we work on our next set of improvements and roll out changes in response to your requests.

Keep ‘em coming!

What’s your thing? Whatever it is, Thingfo will help you create and share information about the things that are important in your life. Maybe you’ve heard of the “internet of things” concept. Wikipedia’s latest entry says:

the Internet of Things refers to a, usually wireless and self-configuring, network between objects, such as household appliances.

Wow. Sounds… super boring. There are way more interesting explanations for the concept, such as Bruce Sterling’s SXSW 2006 keynote on Spimes and the Internet of things). And it’s not that self-configuring toaster networks won’t do wonders for our lives. They probably will, especially for those involved in manufacturing these toasters.

But I digress.

One of the ideas behind Thingfo is that the “internet of things” is going to revolve around people as much as it does around things. Since we don’t want to wait for the toasters to wire themselves up, we figured we can help get things started.

What are the things that are important to you? To the people around you? Thingfo will help you organize, share and broadcast information about your things - even if those things turn out to be self-networking toasters.

We’re currently testing the service, and looking for feedback and suggestions. If you’re interested, get in touch or ask for an invite.