Bluedot.us Now Faves - Topic Networks

Bluedot.us has changed their name to Faves as of today. I had a lengthy call with the executives last week but idiot me left all my notes at home. I have pasted their release below as a back-up. Here is the basic idea - they changed their name to more accurately reflect what they do, the .us isn't as "trustworthy" and they are focused around topic networks. Instead of finding people by name and friending them, you search on topics and find networks of content around the topics you are interested in. I think the move makes sense an certainly hope that the bluedot.us spam slows down. I receive 4-6 a day and have basically just deleted anything from bluedot.us.

Press release follows:

Blue Dot launches topic networks, changes name to Faves.com
Bookmarking site serves community-rated content
on personalized home pages based on members' favorite topics

SEATTLE – November 7, 2007 – Social discovery and bookmarking site Blue Dot today announced that it has changed its name to Faves.com to better reflect the company's enhanced offering, which includes personalized home pages that feature community-rated content about members' favorite topics.

The Faves.com Web site uses "topic networks” to connect members and to give members quick and easy access to the highest rated content on their chosen topics. Once a member has specified topics of interest, Faves.com will recommend related topics, find people with similar interests, and create a personalized home page to feature the most popular web sites about those topics.

"Lots of people regularly track their special interests on the web,” said Rob Dickerson, chief executive officer of Faves.com. "But the Web has more content than any one person can easily find and read. Faves.com is continually updated with latest, highest-quality recommendations, providing our users with an easy and efficient way to browse through information about their favorite topics. Topic networks also let you participate in focused communities that share your interests without having to build up a network of friends.”

New Faves.com Features
The new Faves.com topic network model allows members to select topics and add them to "My Topics” lists. Members' personalized home pages are then built and organized using the highest ranked and most frequently viewed and commented content submissions. Faves.com also recommends new topics based on members' voting history and correlation with other members' subscriptions.

After joining Faves.com, two buttons are installed in members' Web browsers — one for going to their Faves.com home page and one for sharing Web content with other Faves.com members. Faves.com members save new "faves” — links to Web content about specific topics — by clicking the "faves” button. For each fave, members can add notes, assign a thumbnail image and quote text from the source Web page. Faves.com provides automatic tagging, so all faves submissions are assigned to the appropriate topics. Once saved, all faves are accessible from the Faves.com searchable online collection of content.
The highest rated content will appear on the home pages of members who have subscribed to topics associated with that fave.

"Faves.com is focused on making it easy for our members to stay current and to consistently find great Web sites and information on the topics they care about,” said Mohit Srivastava, co-founder of Faves.com. "We ask the question, 'What are your favorite things?', and then we deliver those things in a newsreader-style home page within a community of like-minded individuals.”

ABOUT FAVES.COM
Founded in October 2004, by Mohit Srivastava and Sumit Sen, Blue Dot, Inc./Faves.com is a Seattle-based company whose mission is to help people find the highest ranked web content across a broad variety of topics. Through a new type of communication described as Social Discovery®, Faves.com's free Web site delivers recommendations personalized to each user's topics of interest. Through a unique Topic Network, Faves.com users are connected to other members who are making the highest quality recommendations of interest to them.  Faves.com is led by an experienced group of entrepreneurs formerly from Microsoft®. To learn more about Faves.com, please visit www.faves.com.