We’ve been doing a lousy job keeping up this blog. And it’s not because we have nothing to report.

Over on the corporate blog there’s a press release announcing StepRep’s new partnership with UniversalBusinessListing.org. This was the culmination of several months of relationship-building with UBL, and the first of what we expect will soon be many partnerships with companies that offer marketing services to small and medium businesses.

We’ve changed directions over the last six months. As you may recall, last year we spent a lot of time building and promoting an application called MyFrontSteps that was meant to help homeowners connect with home service providers.

MyFrontSteps and StepRep were conceived as two halves of a whole, a socially-intelligent matrix where service providers could connect to new customers, and homeowners could seek out reliable service providers, through a network of mutual recommendations.

It was pretty audacious, and it never really took off. We learned a lot from the experiment, and we built some incredible technology that we’ve since licensed to another company. But MyFrontSteps itself we’ve basically abandoned. (You can still head over to MyFrontSteps.com, log in with your Facebook or Google account, and have a look around.)

Here’s what we learned.

• Lesson 1. People have spent a lot of time building their social networks on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They don’t want to put in a whole bunch of effort to duplicate a network that they’ve already built.

This insight inspired us to develop MashedIn, a platform that tunnels through the barriers between social networks to reveal previously hidden connections.

• Lesson 2. The reputation management components of StepRep are extremely popular with small and medium-sized businesses. These reputation management tools, which we initially developed as gravy for our larger plan of connecting businesses and their customers, quickly turned into our core technology.

So we’ve concentrated on bulking up StepRep as a reputation intelligence tool. And lately we’ve made that technology available to partners of all kinds. Online directories, SEO companies, Certified Marketing Representatives, domain hosting companies – anyone who offers marketing-related services to small and medium businesses – can bundle our reputation intelligence tools with their existing services, or add them as an upgrade.

Meanwhile, anyone who’s interested in monitoring their online reputation can continue to sign up over at StepRep.com.

Huh. This blog post doesn’t begin to catch up on all the stuff we’ve been up to over the last few months. We’ll try and do better.