Early adopters

Steve and I are heads down on a second phase of major features. We hope to unveil these soon, in a few weeks or so, and we'll talk more about them later. One feature that I will mention in the mean time is categories, which will be available very soon. This is an obvious feature that will allow our users to specify a category when they create a new mob, and you will be able to filter the list views against the category of mobs you want to view. Coming soon.

We've recently posted YouMob beacons under a couple of "badge" providers like badged.net, so we've been seeing some traffic as a result of click throughs on our YouMob beacons. We have a few blog authors who are now making sure their new entries are added as mobs under YouMob, and there have been a few comments posted in those mobs as well. We're excited to see this happen of course, as a key scenario for YouMob is live users congregating around blog mobs, conversing with the blog author and discussing the mob content with others.

On a lark, I ventured to a recently added blog mob, Death by Children, where I read the following entry by blog author, Christopher "G" Garlington:

In my ceaseless, arduous journey to blog stardom, to becoming Dooced--maybe even by Dooce--to getting the kind of Google numbers Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears get, I keep reading about Digg and Stumble Upon. I honestly don't understand Digg or Technocrati though I have accounts with both. I'm monkey level there. But I use Stumble All the time. I pin little Stumble reminders onto my posts and I really honestly think I deserve some attention there. So, Stumble Gods, if you don't mind, could you send ten or twelve thousand people my way?

We think YouMob will be a great vehicle for promoting sites like Garlington's blog. The user community features that we have coming will accentuate the content of blogs like this, will give users a reason to come back and visit the blog, and, of course, YouMob's beacons, referential advertising, and other publicity tools will make a level playing ground for blogs (and other content sites) like this to compete on a more level playing field than what's available in listing sites like Digg/Stumble or content publishing nodes like MySpace.

As we finish up our next phase of features and then turn our attention to spreading the news about YouMob, those sites who are busy building up their user community and presence on YouMob will greatly benefit. They'll have a big jump on mobs that are created later on. So our message is: Come join us now as we're ramping up, get your feet wet, and spread the word.