1. instant notification of new inbox or stream messages (red circles in the sidebar show how many new items have arrived)
2. note privacy (you can now set your notes to be only visible to certain friends by name or tag grouping)
3. email communication preference (we’ve added opt-out to the account page if you think we send you too many emails)
4. option & reminder to update your status when you publish a note (you can now blast notification of your new Minggl notes using the status blaster)

Let us know what you think!

Context is king, it bridges understanding, broadens your scope, explaining your feelings, motives, and experience. When you status-update or tweet your thoughts about a site, your message requires the reader to click through to another page. They have to work to establish context. Your thoughts don’t live in a vacuum, why should your comments?

Sure, some sites allow built-in commenting. Those that do are frequently subject to approval and moderation, and they determine for you, who sees your content and where. But your thoughts don’t require approval from someone else, why should your comments?

With Minggl notes, you can hang a video, image or text message layered on top of any website and then share it privately and securely with any of your Minggl contacts (defined as your entire list of web-friends including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Flicker users)  Think of it as stealth web graffiti. Or a secret decoder ring for the web. Come on in and try it.

Around 1440 C.E., Johannes Gutenberg’s  invention of the mechanical movable type printing press introduced scalability of one-to-many (written) communications by lowering the barrier of entry to mass publication. No longer did content publication require the enormous resources of ecclesiastical or government-funded scriptoriums with scores of hand scribe labor. Mass publication was now within relative reach for secular and non-governmental interests at only the considerable price of a printing press. [Publishing, however, remained somewhat centralized, contingent upon significant commercial resources and geographic proximity to a sizable and weighty press, as well as specialized and difficult to acquire expertise in operation and maintenance of the press device.]

This technological shift made citizen journalism feasible, enabling distributed (and, so, difficult to censor) publication of diverse and counter-cultural opinions, data, and narratives. Smaller organizations now wielded the power to communicate ideas beyond earshot. The printing press thus fertilized the broadly egalitarian political and commercial impulses of democracy, labor organization, and the free market. Freedom of (written) speech became possible, popular, and defensible. Human social interaction and the world map changed considerably upon this threshold. We owe much of what I reckon is best of our modern cultures to the printing press.

Now, at the burgeoning intersection of portable computing, wireless broadband, simplified (and social) web publication, and easy creation of multi-media content, the barrier of entry to mass and multi-media publication is now largely eliminated. This brave new distributed printing press, it turns out, fits (easily) in the palm of your hands and requires only widely available resources and common skills.  The publishing platforms for opinion, fact and story are numerous, simple, and accessible. And once published, they are easy to find.

This is where Minggl fits in. It wraps these many potent platforms up, and keeps it portably accessible within your browser, wherever you browse. It facilitates simple use and meta-mastery of the whole exciting thing, not just a slice. Tweet that, yo.

Install Minggl and join the revolution.

We’ve just released a major upgrade to Minggl–version 2.0.  It’s got many of the things we’ve been dying to show you, that previously were not quite ready for prime time. Below I highlight some of the features & changes you can expect with this significant new release.

1. To give you more space for your favorite sites, the “friends” and “stream” buttons and their related menus, have been moved from the toolbar, into the Minggl menu and sidebar
2. You can now access almost everything directly from the sidebar
3. Other features like a “mass mailer” and “friend manager” are available under the Minggl menu
4. Note creation (formerly called “Add Flair”) has also been moved off of the toolbar and into the sidebar as well
5. The sidebar has been completely reorganized, giving you consolidated views of your incoming content of MANY types, including:
   • Inboxes (from all of your sites simultaneously)
   • News Stream by site
   • Stream by “favorites”  (top friends or other user created tags)
   • Composite friend list that is searchable by tags, friend names and sites
     (sometimes even a few attributes from their social profiles when available)

New Features:

1. Inbox messages from all your sites in ONE place  (can anyone else do that?)
2. You can now drop private messages to friends (including images or video) directly onto almost ANY website.
3. Public Profile where friends can see your favorite online social hangouts  (you can hide them as well)
4. Much improved UI, sidebar and tool tips to help you get the most from Minggl
5. Image “preview” — now you don’t have to visit websites to see photo’s that your friends have posted
6. Blocking of friends from the news-feed (without unfriending them at the social site)
7. Ability to tell your friends where you’ve hidden Notes
8. New tutorial videos (available shortly)
9. Explanation of minggl privacy policy (video)

Known issues:

1. Friend manager (bulk tagging): This UI has a few problems. It’s not especially obvious how to “remove” a tag off of a group of people.  The “remove …” button is in the upper right corner…..it’s “modal” and we’re working on re-designing this UI.  It works, just not as easily as we’d like
2. Bulk messages  (group email): Some websites limit the # of direct messages you can send in one day.   If you select too many people from one of those sites, such that it exceeds this threshold, some friends will not receive your message.  While we’re working on a solution, at the current time, Minggl does not warn you when this has happened. Check the limits at your particular social site and you can always go into your “Sent” folder on the site and confirm that all your messages were delivered.

What can you expect from Minggl going forward:

The social web has turned each of you into rock-stars. Many of you super-social elites  have more information being thrown at you than a typical CEO at some Fortune 500 companies. We’re obsessed with efficiency – in our engineering, and in our personal lives.   We’re even a tad-bit entitled and its our belief that you should not have to deal with people, noise or information that’s not interesting or useful to you. Our goal is to entitle you, and allow you to deal with only those things that are worthy of your attention.   Toward this end, the big secret that Minggl has been building under the hood for over 3 years is a system that “learns” who’s important in your life, and filters out the rest.

The theory hypothesizes that for a given community to have a high chance of survival in a dangerous environment, the members of that group need to possess an accurate working sense of the trustworthiness, competence and social history of the other members. This number is essentially a measure of when “social cohesion” begins to break down, and Dunbar tells us that the majority of humans lose the ability to do well beyond about 150 relationships.

So, you ask, how does all this apply to the social web? Let me answer your question with a few questions of my own:

1. How many people make up your TOTAL friend list including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc?
2. How many new people do you meet and “friend” each week on one of these sites?
3. As your dating, work or scholastic situation changes, how do your peer groups and relationship priorities change?

By answering these questions you’ve likely realized that:

1. You’re connected to WAY MORE than 150 people
2. Each of them is generating all sorts of NSN (news-stream-noise:  prounounced “non-sense”)
3. For many of these people, their relevance to your life is low, and changes as your life circumstances change
4. You’ve missed important news from people you really care about, because it was buried in all the NSN

So you have your answer….the social web is exceeding our Dunbar capacity…overrunning the human brain with too much information.  So how do we adapt?? We could wait for evolution to expand our brains, but that might take awhile—there’s a guy here in Austin who will never get there…

Or we could all become rock-stars and hire secretaries, managers, coaches and handlers. Finally, we could develop tools that can (implicitly and explicitly) learn who’s important in our lives, and then use that knowledge to promote some information, and filter out all the rest. This is what Minggl is doing behind the scenes, and a future version of Minggl will begin to bring this functionality to life.

More reading on Dunbar can be found on Wikipedia.org.

After my divorce and subsequent social-rebirth, I really wanted to engage with people in meaningful ways. I began using Friendster, Match, MySpace, and eventually Facebook among others. And being a committed experience addict, I also habitually over-schedule myself, and I rarely had time to do (what I now call) the “Dunbar sort”.

I’ll do another post soon that further explains Dunbar, but for now, it means weeding-out all the information and people who weren’t good candidates to help me get my fix. I wanted a better way to focus on those experiences and people who satisfied my need for adrenaline, as well as those who’s engagement with me helped to bolster my self-esteem. (do I sense another post on Maslow emerging here?)

In my experience, the social web is comprised of things such as:

• ongoing relationships
• in-box (email) content
• news-stream & status updates
• events and scheduling priorities
• introductions and match-making
• presenting an “image” of how I’d like to be perceived by others

When I look at psychology, and human behavior in the real world, our brains are always running this “dunbar sort”, removing the irrelevant and boring, automatically and unconsciously. It’s how we prioritize the who, what, why and when from the above list.  On the social web, even assholes frequently have 100’s of “friends”. This is many more relationships than a human brain can effectively juggle and sort, and I couldn’t find any tools to help me do it at all – especially in this high volume contex… and certainly not across all of these communities.

If you need a real world metaphor for the solution that I’m seeking, consider the problem of a rock star and his entorage. His dressing room only fits 120 people, and he has a limited supply of Tequila and Quaaludes. He needs to pick the most entertaining invitees for the backstage party, from among 20,000 screaming fans. How does he do this? Does he personally go out and interview each groupie himself? The party would be over long before he finished. He has a cadre of roadies, security guards and high-school buddies that know what he likes. They do the filtering for him, and the party starts on-time, with the filtering already handled.

I started Minggl to solve this problem, with the understanding and expectation that the interesting peoople and events on the web, would be dispursed across many communities, sites and services. This problem is not solvable by any one site… people choose different venue’s (concerts if you wish to continue the above metaphor) and it’s impossible to predict where they will choose to hang out next.  It won’t always be where I choose to hang out. We needed an “filtering agent” that was portable across all the concert halls… and that’s where Minggl is headed.

Here is a comment I recently posted to Techcrunch on this same subject..

Marie “the Minggl intern” here! This is my very last week of college (at the University of Texas anyway). It is oh so bittersweet, but luckily more sweet than bitter. The last-last day of classes is this Friday, but MY last day is Wednesday. Sweet, huh!

The past 3 years have been a blast at UT.  I’ve learned a thing or two in my classes, but more so in actually living a college life. I grew up more than I knew I could and I’ve met people that have completely changed the course of my life.  So how does Minggl fit into the picture? Well, I hope to continue my personal development through sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, both Minggl capable, which will help me transition and network as I begin to turn the next page of my novel called Life. I feel Minggl is one of those products that I can take forward with me on my journey.

I have come into contact with more people who are not looking forward to graduating college than people who are actually looking forward to what’s ahead. Isn’t that kind of sad? I’m in the latter category of people that understand that my time in college has swiftly come and gone and that what’s in store for me in the future is only going to be as good as I make it. I want to pave a positive, optimistic road for myself as I face new challenges and add ingredients to the boiling pot that is brewing my ideal equation to life that will help me be a better person. Of course “better” is a bit broad, but at least I’m aiming for something!

Anyway, I’ve had a LinkedIn account for quite a while, but I never really knew what I could use it for until I got a job offer from the company I will start working for in July. It seems to be one of the most valuable networking devices I can utilize as I build my portfolio of work and grow my professional network into a metroplex of people that are all within my reach. Minggl, again, comes into the picture as the simplest way to update my status on LinkedIn as well as getting updates on the activities of my LinkedIn contacts. I want to maximize my usage capabilities on this site now that I’ve realized its potential and simply set myself up for success.

Using Minggl has helped me realize how vital it is to simplify the way information is shared and received. If you think about it, it wasn’t too long ago that the term “social media” was only a daydream and that a Twitter was nothing more than the sound of a bird. We’ve certainly come a long way, so why not take advantage of what’s accessible nowadays *ahem Minggl *ahem?

I’ve decided that my favorite Minggl features are auto log-in, the live stream sidebar, and Flair Notes. Minggl is definitely worth a try. That’s not my biased self talking, that’s my logical self exclaiming! There are endless ways to mold Minggl into what works for you. You simply have to open your mind, reach out, and give it a try. Like Nike, just do it.

Until next time, Happy Minggling!

>>Marie

Last Saturday our team was fortunate to be involved in this program. We helped build a home in East Austin. Our keyboard jocks did quite well away from the computer…Joel worked the circular saw, Blake was in charge of cement making and pouring, Marcus helped put up soffit. Glad to report no recordable injuries and everyone had a good time. To learn how you or your company can get involved find your local chapter from their main page: www.habitat.org.

Brandon daydreaming about PHP, Dewey showing off the guns, and Danielle standing on the wrong side of a ladder (she's young, she'll learn).

Let’s start with the easy part, the plumbing.  Dan writes, as the number of social networks you use increases, “Your ability to constantly update each profile, to ensure it includes the most updated and accurate information, will be unmanageable and unenjoyable.”  As he notes, many tools exist today to help with this.  Currently at Minggl we offer the ability to update multiple parts of your identity across sites at the same time.  Users can update status, send messages, and post photos to multiple sites from Minggl (note – the photos are currently only viewable to other Minggl users).

Another plumbing problem we consistently hear is simply remembering passwords for multiple sites.  Minggl automates login and navigation to sites for users.  In fact, data sharing tools such as Facebook Connect, MySpace ID, Google Friend Connect, and OpenID address the login issue as well.  As long as Minggl and other apps continue to build plumbing to connect sites you can scratch that as a reason against joining more.

Dan also wrote, “by joining a social network, you are setting “conversational” expectations, meaning that people should expect you to have a decent level of participation on each one.”  This is the more difficult problem to solve.  But updating status on all your sites on a regular basis with one of the existing tools that enable this already takes care of managing a significant part of your identity.  And the opening up of platforms and data sharing also help you keep up your identity…if only in the “ambient awareness” sense.  You can scroll through your Facebook newsfeed to get a sense for what friends are doing on other sites outside of Facebook such as YouTube and Flickr.  As such, the aggregate feed of what a friend is doing around the web provides a sense of identity and participation.  So your friends don’t really have to be actively participating on all their networks all the time.

Minggl aggregates friend activity and plans to take it a step further.  We already help you prioritize information flowing in and away based on relationship categories (coworker, classmate, family, etc).  In future versions, what comes into your view and what goes out to your friends will be based on relationship strength with each of them.  For example, Minggl will know to share my party photos from the weekend only with my college buddies.  And it will know to notify me immediately when I get a message from super blogger Robert Scoble.  Since I am actively sharing and receiving content with my most important friends, my participation on social networks should be quite satisfactory to all.  To learn more about our view on managing relationships on the web, read our submission to the W3C Workshop on the future of social networking.

Please share your feedback and thoughts.