Blogfriends, the Facebook application for adding blogs to your Facebook feed, plans to come out of beta next Monday with a full launch, promising to do something to monetise blogs in a way they haven’t been before [Update: they now say they won’t ‘monetise’ for a while yet and the app will be available from here]. It’s a tall order, but there’s something about privately-held i-together and its CEO Luke Razzell which gives me a hunch that they may just do something interesting. Why do I think that? Blogfriends is a smart app inside Facebook which attempts to mashup up your interests with your social network in order to bring you only the blog posts that you want to read. It’s a slick application and I’m told the feedback from users I know has been pretty good. The other reason is that Razzell – who I have met a couple of times at business events – has an almost academic, granular insight into the concept of identity – something you will also pick up from reading his own blog and that of I-Together’s. If Facebook is about anything, it’s about identity, which is what suggests that Blogfriends may be up to something interesting. I don’t for a moment think it will replace the big heavyweight feed-readers like Google Reader of course. But it may do a lot to make RSS and feeds more mainstream via the mainstream audience in Facebook.
