We’re excited about the new set of features added to the Minekey website today, which we’re sure will increase the value of our widget to bloggers, publishers and end users.

New features include:

• Widget Gallery. The Gallery makes it easy for you to syndicate personalized widgets. By creating widgets for the Gallery that display content from your blog, you can secure exposure to a much wider audience.

• OPML Support. In just a few simple steps, you can now display relevant content from your favorite sources in Minekey widgets. By uploading your OPML files, you can quickly create widgets that display content from your blogroll.

• Network. Profile your blog and browsing interests, and showcase your widgets.

• My Reports. We’ve improved the charts significantly and now make available statistics, including the capability for you to track how many of your widgets are being used by other bloggers.

Following several months of beta deployments of the Minekey widget by over 800 bloggers, last week the widget was officially launched. Since, we’ve been delighted with the great feedback we’ve received from many bloggers and other users – including Techcrunch, Mashable and Webware.

To keep you all well informed on our progress, here’s a short list of the new features we rolled out with the launch:

1. New User Interface for our website. We’ve introduced a more sophisticated design, including more instructional information and a framework built to accommodate a host of other exciting features that will be introduced in the coming months.
2. New Widget styles. Now you can choose between three widget designs – Cheerful, Grey and Full Customizable. The cheerful option is more colorful, and to date the most popular. Look for yourself.
3. Dashboard. Our Dashboard page gives a snapshot of the following core features available to you:
1. My Widgets – Here you can configure your widgets. If you need to add feeds or change the style and colors, you can do so by just clicking on the relevant widget.
2. My History – Anyone who has signed into the Minekey website is able to view a history of all the articles they’ve visited which sport Minekey blogs. So even if you’re not a blogger, this is a good reason to sign up with Minekey. Stay tuned for some really exciting updates to this section of the website that will soon be available.
3. My Reports – We’ve received lots of feedback on the usefulness of Minekey’s analytics. Don’t miss out on this feature if you host a blog. The statistics we offer on the behavior of your visitors will definitely add precision to any efforts you make to profile your users and their interests.

We could on and on about everything else, but We’ll leave it up to you sign up, create a widget and take full advantage of Minekey’s features.

We’d like to give full acknowledgements to the hard work of our 2 teams in India. They worked tirelessly to get this out before the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit

Raymond
Product Manager

Some of the bloggers and end users have reported the issue about recommendations not updating frequently.

Latest post by Startup Squad mentions that while recommendations are getting updated when users click on the recommendations in the widget, they are not getting updated in line with the context of the article or when the user clicks on the articles on the page.

We appreciate the valuable feedback from all of you.

Minekey engine does provide recommendations based on the context of the article and the user’s browsing history. However, we have understood the reason behind the Latency issue here. Some of these blogs are using 3rd party Feed burning/ reporting services like Feed Burner; as a result the article’s URLs or Permalinks on the blog are quite different from the URLs in the feed. Hence, Minekey’s system wasn’t able to update the user clicks in these cases. We thank the Minekey users who have pointed this to us. We are working on a fix and we’ll roll it out in the next few days. Thanks for your patience. We’ll post an update as soon as we are done.

It has been 5 weeks since we launched the beta of the Minekey recommendations service.

Over 500 bloggers have actively participated in our beta program so far and we have clocked an aggregate CTR (Click Through Rate) of 6.35%.

Apart from a small launch event back at IIT Kharagpur, we have kept a low profile to make sure we fine tune the service based on the feedback from the Beta customers. Before we start getting the word out, we want to ensure we resolve all the critical issues and be confident that our service and infrastructure can scale. Interestingly, some of the bloggers have already discovered us and have posted reviews on their blogs. Here are some of them:

http://www.killerstartups.com/WebAppTools/Minekey–Content-Recommendation-Widget-1/

http://startupsquad.com/2007/05/21/minekey-more-details/

http://startupsquad.com/2007/05/18/minekey-tries-contextual-recommendations/#comments

http://www.widgetslab.com/index.php/2007/05/17/minekeycom-recommendations-widget/

Also, we have received some very interesting feedback from the bloggers who have tried our product and the bloggers who would like to try our product but saw some limitations. We are working hard to address several of these issues in the next release that we are putting out in the next few days. Of course, we’ll continue to make more improvements in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.