I’m pleased to announce the beta release of the Jobster Blog Buddy, a little project whipped up by myself and the very talented Tony Wright.

The Blog Buddy is a Flash widget that can be embedded in any web site to display the Jobster profiles of recent visitors.  (We respect users’ privacy, users are shown on the Blog Buddy only if they opt in.)  The idea is to help blog authors and their readers learn more about each other. 

One unique feature of the blog buddy is its interactivity, allowing readers to expand the card for a user and learn more about that user without having to navigate away from the site. This is both faster for the user and better for the site owner. 

As you mouse over the card of a visitor, the card expands to display more information about that user, including any job openings they’re hiring for and their Super Star tags.  (See the screenshots below or check out a live demo.

Normal	Expanded

The Blog Buddy is still in beta, but I encourage you to give it a try if you have a blog or want your profile to be visible on blogs you visit. 

One caveat: The Blog Buddy is working well with IE7 and Firefox, but for reasons that aren’t yet understand it’s not working with IE6.

If you added the Blog Buddy to your site before Thursday, April 5, please replace the code on your site with the latest version from Jobster for improved IE7 compatability.

Technical notes: Technically, the Blog Buddy is interesting because it combines a REST web service with a flash widget which consumes the data from the service.  (Here is a sample XML feed from the service.)

If anyone wanted to build a variant of the Blog Buddy which used HTML instead of Flash, or even to create a mashup that combined the data with other web services, it would be easy to do so.

This was my first experience working in Flash and Actionscript, and I found it be a generally positive experience relative to Ajax development, though not without challenges, especially around Internet Explorer and the required EOLAS workarounds. I’ll write more about that later.