Call for admins!

Interested in helping police the buddystumbler community? Buddy me (viper) up and let's talk!

Universal profile

many social networking sites require people to add a profile and describe themselves. on the internet it's difficult to know about much about a stranger across the country by simply reading a profile description. moreover most of these sites fall short as users rarely update their profile. so when i'm browsing a profile on other social networking sites i don't really know much about the person hence it makes it difficult for me to reach out to them.

buddystumbler solves that problem by allowing users to integrate their buddystumbler profile with other sites that they update frequently - blogs, photos, knowledge, etc.

last year we introduce an integration to blog sites like blogger, wordpress, xanga, livejournal and myspace. so in the buddystumbler profile the latest blog entries from any of these sites will be displayed.

two months back we introduced photo site integration which allows users to show additional photos as part of their profile. buddystumbler can pull in photos from flickr, sharpcast or smugmug.

today we are also introducing integration with yedda (a leading questions and answers by aol). check out my profile which integrates with all our partners.

again, the goal is to ease introductions on the web so the more you know about someone the easier it is to make the decision to reach out to them. we want your buddystumbler profile to be the universal profile.

around one year ago, buddystumbler stumbled up

It's been almost a year now since buddystumbler (beta) went live. The original design of the site was in many ways inspired by Craigslist and Google - minimalist, purpose-driven, and simple. Boy have things changed one year later! In the end, I'm very proud of what we've accomplished. We set out to solve a core problem to help people make new friends and I know we've done it.

I thought it would be constructive to talk about what went well and what didn't as a retrospective. Since I'd like to call myself a bit of a realist, let's start with what did not go well.

1. Beta launch contest

The beta launch contest turned out to be a major mistake. The vast majority of the users gained through that effort did not stay on the site and had no intention to use the site for what it was intended. The contest rewarded those users who invited and cajoled the most users to join to get a cash prize. In retrospect, that cash prize could have yielded the same number of users by 10x or more through search-engine advertising.

2. Lowering the bar for profile quality

During this same exploratory phase, we decided to lower the number of characters people needed to submit for their description as well as the number of keywords. While this helped our overall visibility rate, it diluted the quality of our user base and attracted looky-loos of various types.

On the positive side, there were a number of things that went very well.

1. Getting the help to fill in the gaps

Amit was an extremely talented developer, however, he needed to exit the project due to his studies. While Yim and I could hold the fort down on the development side, we needed help in other areas. This became patently obvious when Yim and I were invited to meet the members of a certain IM aggregator company. The two of us were like deer in headlights - star struck and speechless. Speaking for myself strictly, I'm not one to brag about what's been done or to sell things. I tend to call things like I see it and in the end that makes me a very poor marketing person.

In time, Yim and I were fortunate enough to meet KopyKat who's overseen all of our Craigslist posting efforts and who's search engine advertising efforts resulted in the acquisition of most of the users we have today, and Drizzle who fields the public relations requests, meets with the bloggers and journalists, and does the leg work for our business development efforts. In an effort to reduce our cash burn, we've since stopped advertising using search engines and have relied on SEO optimization entirely which is a key component to keeping the site up today and we have Drizzle to thank for this.

The combination of these efforts by Drizzle and KopyKat have allowed the site to stay up when it very well would have shuttered a long time ago. My realization here was that building a site is just the first step in keeping a site alive. I have never questioned how great an idea buddystumbler is, but without the right people to execute on it, it would have gone nowhere.

2. User feedback

When the site first began, we thought we had a clear picture of what our users valued. We didn't. While we do show a prominent contact us link on every page - it soon became obvious that few users actually use that facility. The use of polling to garner user feedback turned out to be a huge boon for us. That feedback allowed us to make incremental changes to the beta while we secretly began tooling away at the launch version of buddystumbler you see today.

3. Finding yourself

Speaking strictly on a more personal level, I've never had a shortage of ideas. What I have had, is a shortage of execution. Looking back, I could make an argument for why I didn't do anything about my ideas. Some are obvious: lack of time, lack of energy, prior commitments, someone else is doing something similar, and so forth. Through buddystumbler, I've come to realize what the true reason is for the lack of execution that plagues so many would-be entrepreneurs.

The real cause of inaction is fear. This fear is not the cliched fear of failure, but rather, it is a fear of finding out who you really are. When an idea resides in the realm of possibility, we can easily fool ourselves into thinking that the person we have in our mind is the person we are meant to be. To the extent you don't act on it, it becomes easy to seduce yourself into thinking that you were a victim of circumstance. The truth is, only in acting upon your idea will you find out if you were meant to be the person you envisioned. That action becomes a mirror and every moment you are acting you begin to see yourself for who you are. Invariably, you will find limitations and I think ultimately that's what scares people and that's what scared me.

Everyday I see people who dream about doing something but fail to because of some "reason." The truth is, there is no time like the present. Action takes courage, but through action you will know yourself and having crossed over I can tell you that it is much better to live in reality versus fantasy.

A close friend of mine once told me, "The things we regret are not the risks we took, but the risks we didn't take."

A couple of folks have asked what's coming up next? I'm a big fan of flickr and I've been waiting on a commercial API key but sadly I think flickr's business development people are completely out to lunch. As a result, I'm determined to add some form of Flickr integration this month; albeit in a slightly unconventional way. Once we have flickr integration, flickr users will be able to stream their pictures to their profile as they upload pictures to flickr. if you have other ideas for enhancements, please let us know!


Happy stumbling!

making friends and meeting people is that cyclic?

after the offical launch on sept 30th we the buddystumbler team met a couple of weeks back to review where we are and what we need to do next. would you believe that after one year of work, this is the first time we actually got together in person for some celebration!!!

we celebrated what we have achieved so far. it's been a great journey, where we have all learnt a lot and provided value to the user community. we talked about the definition of success and whether buddystumbler has been a success. we concluded that yes we have succeed in what we set out to achieve. buddstumbler has successfully created connections between members of the buddystumbler community. users have made friends and even some love connections. as a buddystumbler user told me once, "it was much easier to meet my boyfriend in person after several online chat sessions since we had already established an online connection"

are people constantly looking to make friends and meet people, or is this cyclic? the answer is clearly no. on buddystumbler we see people come online to establish new connections and friendships. they meet someone they are interested in and then they go away hoping to focus on the recent connections. after all the power of buddystumbler is enabling chat which users do using their favorite IM client. hopefully those connections work and sustain, otherwise people come back and look for new friendships.

we are thankful for the opportunity to help you make friends and meet people for hopefully lasting relationships/connections.

so go ahead stumble upon friends whenever you feel like, buddystumbler is here to serve you.

make new friends and meet people online: out of beta and into the great beyond

It has been quite a while since I made a post of depth. Like other members of the buddystumbler team, the summer has proven to be quite busy on the professional front making it hard to squeeze time to blog about the buddystumbler entrepreneurial experience. When we have had the time, we've been working tirelessly on the revision of the site you see today: the official release of buddystumbler which we hope will allow people to make new friends!

Our beta began last December, and in the ensuing 10 months we have:

1. Launched polls to gather usability feedback
2. Experimented with different marketing schemes to build a diverse demographic
3. Tweaked the buddystumbler concept to better meet the needs of our users

With the new look and feel, we hope to build a site that addresses usability issues we faced during the beta and to provide a foundation for new features that are forthcoming before we close at 2008. It has been a great ride so far, and for those users who have stuck by us since the beginning - Thank you! As usual, feel free to buddy any of the team up; we like to meet people online and all feedback is welcome.

Here's our press release:

Buddystumbler has announced its official launch after months of beta testing.

Buddystumbler.com is a new, revolutionary way to make new friends—it is the only social networking site that is based on existing instant messaging (IM) networks. With IM clients such as AOL, Yahoo, MSN or Google, you can meet people online through exchanging screen names. Users create profiles that include photos, a description, and interests to show others what they like. Furthermore, buddystumbler.com provides a powerful interface to enable search by user profile, interest and location.

“There are millions of users on existing IM networks chatting with known friends, colleagues and family members. Until buddystumbler.com there was not an easy way for these users to find other like-minded people to chat with.” said Han-Shen Yuan, founder of buddystumbler.com.
By developing buddystumbler.com, Yuan found a way to enable chatting on a new and more personal level. Buddystumbler.com provides a community of Internet users to exchange screen names so you can communicate with new people for free online chat.

“One of the biggest differences between us and other social networking sites is that you do not have to log onto the website constantly to meet new people. You simply create a profile and make new friends using your existing IM client.” said Yuan.

Recently, buddystumbler has enabled more comprehensive profiles. Users can now include their latest blog entries from Xanga, Myspace, LiveJournal or Blogger. The buddystumbler interface leverages the Web 2.0 paradigm and is built using the Ruby on Rails framework. Yim Lee, UI architect and co-founder of buddystumbler.com, has refined the interface based on feedback from thousands of users after months of beta testing.

Since its beta launch, buddystumbler.com has launched its new interface to create a revolutionary way of social networking. “The production launch is a milestone for the whole team and we hope to continue helping others make connections through instant messaging,” said Yuan. “Our motto is ‘I search therefore IM’. Enabling people to search and establishing new connections with others is our mission. Happy stumbling!”