Blue Dot is not just another social bookmarking system

Oh please, please, please publish the nasty review.

I have been a beta tester since they first started up and it is - IMHO - much more user friendly than delicious. The team in Seattle is really nice and working hard to deliver a robust and useful application - this aint no vaporware folks.

http://bluedot.us/users/jeff

Marshall - I don’t really understand in what way is Blue Dot “pioneering” …

All the feature sets you mentioned are nothing unusual … it basically sounds like a more feature-rich del.icio.us … And it is indeed competing with all of the other social bookmarking services. Yes, by branding itself as “Social Discovery” and having more user-friendly feature set may help them attract more non-expert users …

perhaps an argument can be made that with the strong team and some nice features, Blue Dot is positioned to be the “myspace of social bookmarking” (i.e. myspace dominates the social network field now even though friendster was the first)

And yes, I’d love to see your nasty review … want to see how the phone call with the team changed your view …

The nasty review was just the complaints at the end of the post above way amplified because I hadn’t really wrapped my brain around the cool features I ended up writing about. Public/private social bookmarking is so much cruder than the ability to create as many different groups as you wish to share bookmarks with.

Many of these features may be found in other contexts, but in the social bookmarking space I think this is pioneering.

Sounds like great features but I have a hard time believing the appeal of such a service is large enough to generate enough income to make the project worthwhile. This is especially true since most of the features that are unusual or remarkable are things that require heavy use.

I will definitely be checking this out. The features that you mentioned (particularly commenting!) nicely fix some of the problems that I have with del.icio.us (which I currently use constantly).

I hope this ends up being as good as I think it could be.

Marshall, can you point me to a social networking site that has an instant messaging implementation that actually works?

My understanding is that IM was pretty much DoA on networking sites.

They could really use a graphic designer on staff. The site has a MySpace feel to it, and that’s not a good thing. Del.icio.us isn’t pretty either, but doesn’t feel this juvenile.

It seems a bit weak that you were only convinced by the cool features after a phone call. Do all the users have to call them? An app should be so useful that the best features stand out, not hidden the way your post make it sound.

lol, fair enough Taz. they totally need to explain themselves better instead of me calling up and saying “your service looks like b.s. do you have anything to say before I write that on TC?”

Sasha, at least 50% of the time IM works on myspace! Who’s using Userplane? Check out the post here last week (?) on PalTalk and it’s new social network demonstrating the viablity of IM and video chat on a massive scale. Whew…you’re right though - that is a hard question. I’d go for email at least.

I have been baffled about this for a super long time. Why on earth would this company need $1.5M? What on earth are they going with all that money? Someone please explain this to me. I just don’t get it.

very cool site, but sound very technical (give access to certain bookmark to certain group). Give a look to Pytagor.com, it’s not only with your group, but friends of your friends

Anyone have any idea about the funding of Bluedot?

Who / when / how much?

Money Man, $1.5 million in angel funding from 5 investors including former Starbucks Senior VP Don Valencia and former Microsoft Senior VP Richard Fade.

Money Man, how about why? Why do they need $1.5M, what are they doing with it, and why do so many of these Web services acquire that kind of money?

What - do - they - do - with - it? That’s all I want to know.

There is no new “technology” here. It’s a big script. It’s also simple. And it’s wonderful. I’d just love an explanation.

Visited the site for two seconds, look too similar to other social networking web 2.0 sites, left.
I’m just a web user and this is my reaction to what I saw. I didn’t read much, I clicked on one profile, clicked back, and closed the window. Will I go back? Highly unlikely.

“I have been baffled about this for a super long time. Why on earth would this company need $1.5M? What on earth are they going with all that money? Someone please explain this to me. I just don’t get it.”

10 employees, office, equipment, etc + breathing time 12-24 months + marketing funds. The funds can easily be added up on thigns you DON’T yet see, and may never see, but are internal part of the business.

“10 employees, office, equipment, etc + breathing time 12-24 months + marketing funds. The funds can easily be added up on thigns you DON’T yet see, and may never see, but are internal part of the business.”

Why waste the money? All of these things are luxury items. We live in a day and age where Web services like this can be built in ones bedroom, and run from them, too.

“Why waste the money? All of these things are luxury items. We live in a day and age where Web services like this can be built in ones bedroom, and run from them, too.”

You’re reading too much about the handful of lucky ones who make it that way. Most however are not. I actually forgot to mention these guys been working since.. 2004. That’s already 24 months before even going live.
Unreasonable? I have a project we’ve been working on for over a year now, 200k later, and not done yet. By the time we finish the technology part and put it all together and put a team in place to execute, we’ll be looking at a Mill plus as well.

“You’re reading too much about the handful of lucky ones who make it that way. Most however are not. I actually forgot to mention these guys been working since.. 2004. That’s already 24 months before even going live.
Unreasonable? I have a project we’ve been working on for over a year now, 200k later, and not done yet. By the time we finish the technology part and put it all together and put a team in place to execute, we’ll be looking at a Mill plus as well.”

But that’s crazy. 24 months before going live? It’s a great service, I am not mocking the service one bit, but that is not 24 months worth of work. There are individuals that could whip something like that up in a few months.

This is where it gets hazy for me. There are so, so many Web services out there, with extremely simple backends, that took a year, or years to build? … eh?

Paul:

Good question on the Why?

I suspect it is because capital is cheap and plentiful today.

As much as VCs like to pretend that they are on the lookout for the next big thing. The truth is that only a select few have the ability to spot it. Once the lead dog has found something that works, everyone else piles into the space, flooding it with money. Their hope is to find variations that will also work.

Flavor of the year is Web-2.0ish-Myspaceish-Social-Photo-Sharing-Blog-SMS-RSS sites.

Got something you want funded?

“Got something you want funded?”

LOL. No, unfortunately not. Thanks for the response.

While blue dot is an interesting concept, it certainly is not revolutionary at this point in the game and it is definitely not something I would use. As a del.icio.us user, I want to be able to do two things particularly well– 1) easily save links to sites in a fashion i can find them later very quickly, 2) search the collective intelligence of everyone else’s bookmarks. Del.icio.us + firefox extensions help me accomplish this in a very KISS manor and I think blue dot just makes something far more complicated (with little value add IMO) for no reason.

Keep it simple stupid.

my two cents.

This is my take on yet another social bookmarking service hitting the market. (apologies in advance for the length).

I have been watching this space avidly since I have an interest in using my bookmarks for professional purposes. None of the players has yet thought beyond building a community of bookmarking users that ‘tag’ web sites and share them, in most cases they are not sharing useful information but just associating themselves to popular web sites.

I keep bookmarks that are useful to my present internet business (mobile related) and to research which can be useful to my business, colleagues and customers. The information I use to describe this research goes well beyond adding a single tag (useless). As an example I spent a lot of time researching the VOIP market last year and have over 500+ bookmarks which represent a lot of research and effort. These bookmarks have information including business model definition, impact analysis (viral, community, technical), revenue potential, multiple comments from reviewers etc. In short these bookmarks are research.

Why none of the bookmarking players have not thought beyond just sharing bookmarks but to view them as a research tool is a mystery to me. If you want a business model, here is one. If somebody dedicates many hours of research and saves that research in the form of a bookmark where his/her research comments can be aggregated (plus the comments of others colleagues/users) you start to add value to the bookmark. A bookmark saved by multiple business users for its useful business research purpose is more valuable than having thousands of users adding a single tag to a bookmark with a comment ‘this site rocks’.

So to all of you budding social bookmarking sites out there. Get a hold of your work and start thinking business. Their is a market out there for bookmarks that have been validated by other business users. There are many internet/research professionals (including this blog) that investigate web sites and companies and analyse them with commentary and for specific reasons. None of your tools address this.

As a further example, if you are a business entering into a new market area (lets use VOIP again), is it easier to type in VOIP on Google and perform your own research or pay $150 for a set of bookmarks that have been validated, commented, reviewed and described by many other business users? If the bookmarks represent several months of research by a single (qualified) business user he/she can work with a bookmark trading community and earn money from his/her work. You will be creating a service offering value to the buyer (quick, validated research) and a new trading market for users that have created value around the bookmarks they have stored with the service.

I suppose I am a bit disappointed that none of the bookmarkservices out in the interweb 2.0 have yet seen this as a market for exploitation. What would Google think if bookmarks they present in a search process not only get represented by their ‘linking’ algorithm but they have a business validation algorithm where the importance of the web site is represented in terms of its business use and by the profile of the business users that have previously visited the web site, researched it and saved it as a useful research commodity. In addition, if the bookmark had been sold many times as part of research, does it make that bookmark more valuable than a bookmark that is unknown in the business community?.

Basic search is not providing all the answers business users need when using the internet, a business bookmarking service can be a valuable resource to this type of user. Why search yourself when thousands of others have already done the same and added immense value to the search with commentary and analysis.

I know there is a lot more to it than just the simple commentary I have added here in this post, but none of the bookmarking services I have seen spring up have addressed the professional user, or have they addressed a potential B2B trading market which is untapped.

Why have I not explored this commercially myself? I am too busy at this moment with a mobile community of 2.5M users - still in stealth mode :0)

But if any of the social bookmarking services want to address this, the requirements and technical background to this is available.

Marshall, you said:
“Public/private social bookmarking is so much cruder than the ability to create as many different groups as you wish to share bookmarks with.
Many of these features may be found in other contexts, but in the social bookmarking space I think this is pioneering.”

Pioneering? Hmmmm….Simpy? Checked it out lately? It’s had this feature for, I don’t know, a year?

Marshall:
I forgot a few more things about Simpy that are interesting in the context of BlueDot:
- VC funding - $0
- Flat structure - very - 1 man
- Launched - 2004

BlueDot makes me think of Blaupunkt… different business, so I suppose there will be no conflict.

Otis,

I have not spent too much time on your service, but can see you have a very interesting Google pagerank and Alexa position - well done.
If you’re interested to discuss a bookmarking for business use, I will drop you en email.

I like the flat structure :0) We are overpopulated in our service, we are 3 with no VC funding - ha haa

Do you think blue dot will get popular? Should I include it with the rest of bookmark buttons in my blogger template tool? I’ve made a show / hide section for social bookmarking that bloggers use to allow their viewers to bookmark their posts on popular services.

I’ve got the good services listed, but new ones keep coming up and it’s hard to decide which to keep, which to remove, and *most* importantly, which to add.

Check out the “Click to social bookmark” links on my site to see the template in action.

I wonder whether the widget that the bluedot team is making is going to be better than other services like say Nooz. Also, there definitely seems to be merit IMO to a commercial model beyond the advertising revenue that a few sites like Simpy offer. shawpy has got an interesting point about trading your bookmarks. Internet Researchers could surely use such a service, and quite profitably IMO. (Zedge.net is nice shawpy, good work!)

Hi there,

Disclaimer: I am an employee of Blue Dot.

OK, now that that’s out of the way, I wanted to say thanks to everyone for the lively discussion. It’s been enlightening. Before too many people go weed-whacking further into the brush, I just wanted to bring up a couple of things to clarify some of the debate points:

- Yes, Blue Dot has raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.5 million dollars. Please do not assume it’s all spent. It’s not. Having money in the bank has allowed us to hire talented people to continue developing. We like knowing we have time to deliver to our investors and respond to our users. We know we have the right team to make good on promises to both, and that’s worth a lot. I spent 6.5 years at Amazon.com prior to joining Blue Dot and I can tell you I’ve never worked with a smarter, more engaging bunch of people than this group here. I look forward to continuing to build with them.

- As to being formed in 2004, that’s true (it is when we were incorporated), but real production code wasn’t begun until May/June of 2005 when the team actually began to form beyond the founders. This is not the product of 24 months but really more like 12 - 13 months.

- Blue Dot was also started on no money. The two co-founders went without pay for more than a year. They used all incoming funding to hire new people. We work on crappy desks from IKEA (table tops $19.99, table legs $40 because they fold, and $40 chairs). Our computers are bottom of the rung Dell desktops. We are, in a word, frugal. That $1.5 is not being spent on booze and women, I promise.

- I want to remind everyone that MySpace wasn’t groundbreaking in terms of features when they launched either. They had not one single feature that you could not find on other sites at the time. What they had was a way of bringing a suite of features to a market that had not seen them before. They crossed into the mainstream because their site was somehow more accessible to the masses. Similarly, we’re NOT trying to build the next bookmark manager. We’re NOT trying to be the next aggregated new site. Right now, what we care about is making sure that you and your friends have a fun and interactive time sharing things online and we expect to keep getting better at it. When we look around, we do feel that that stance, for better or worse, IS somewhat unique in the space.

Cheers!

I think the site looks cool, and works well..

I think the Key here is, “make is simple and easily usable”.. which in turn, would make it very popular to the average Joe!

well done guys..

I just set up an account. With all due respect to those who say that this isn’t significantly different from del.icio.us, I have to say I completely disagree. After being set up for a few minutes I have buttons on safari, that open a nice little js popover, and I saw a little demo how to use thing. I can do the same thing in del.icio.us but it takes me a while to get there (actually I can’t get a little js popover in safari with del.ico.us). Maybe I’m just excited because I got a peach username.

However, how can you choose a website name without making sure you can get the .com first?

“However, how can you choose a website name without making sure you can get the .com first?”

Ouch, just noticed that. That’s very immature to say the least. If the service becomes successful they will lose allot of traffic to the .com equivalent.
Blue.com was sold not long ago for USD500k. While some may see it as a high price (we actually offered 250k for it ourselves) having that domain would guarantee constant eyeballs to your site (type in/direct navigation) traffic.
A quick estimation for commercial traffic on that domain.. about 200,000 eyeballs a year.
– blue.com sale source : http://www.dnjournal.com/ytd-sales-charts.htm

wow ! in israel we have somthing , not really like this , but if they continue
to pay attention to users emails i think they can make it…it started for us-the students and now everyone use it.

sorry,the site i wrote about was : http://www.web2.co.il

Rohum, May be you have a different idea about a product, and this why you comment are free, but you can at least respect their hard work

shawpy I find your comment very interesting, professional bookmark, community bookmark. I totally agree, community bookmarking may avoid ’this site rocks’ tag. I’m using Pytagor, it may have a little answer to your question (community bookmark). I don’t understand why TechCrunch never speaks about it

I can see the headlines now:

“Searchles is another not just another social bookmarking system”

We at Dumbfind just launched a social bookmarking site called Searchles last week (Search + Circles = Searchles). We have a number of features you outlined in your review like flash MySpace embeds and searching of your network of friends. What we offer that is new or notable is Youtube and Google videos automagically embedded into results, full text search (Dumbfind is a search engine, we have considerable expertise there) of pages you submit, and the ability to search full text in combination with tags (this is our main differentiator at Dumbfind).

Where we differ is our intent for the site. We don’t want to make just another social bookmarking site, or even just another social bookmarking site with social networking features.

We are making a social search engine.

Dumbfind will merge with Searchles in the next few months to create a search engine that crawls the web and is enhanced by its users (Dumbfind already has a search engine that crawls the web and automatically tags content). The “social” is a very important term when describing our social bookmarking service. We know that Yahoo is moving in this direction, but del.icio.us has a problem, it is very susceptible to spam because it has an essentially flat structure. Through network analysis we can allow search relevancy to be enhanced by “popular” people, by “knowledgeable” people, by your friends, or by anyone you choose on the site. You will be able to search using someone elses personality, or the personalities of groups of people.

We think this is the future of search.

http://www.dumbfind.com
http://www.searchles.com

Mary,

My response to social bookmarking sites is “you are not getting my research for free distribution, we can create a business model together and we can form a partnership”, but lets seperate bookmarks (from which many of us are generating business and revenue) from bookmark fan worship.

If you are using Pytagor (or even are part of the team there) I would be willing to discuss this further but the core of the ‘long’ posting I made was that their is a business that can be made from the validation process when people who use the interweb :0) to find, analyse and save information that is found. Their is a market for buying knowledge.

Current search technology is very limited. Bringing like minded people together in a community to add value to the art of discovery (search) is the way to go and only if the bookmarking web companies can add a new layer or position themselves to address this new ‘business’ model.

I can see and appreciate the advertising business model of many of the bookmark sites but is it not time to go further and look for greenfield opportunities such as business bookmarks/research.

Think about it, why do we all vist this blog and add comments? It’s because we are participating in the validation process (of this blog) and contibuting our knowledge for a purpose related to business. If any of us tell a client or colleague to follow this blog we do it as a recommendation, this gets accepted and Michael Arrington does not pay us :0) But I know many corporate clients that do not know of web sites/companies like this and they are willing to buy such knowledge - lets get this new market moving.

Michael,

You had better re-think the blog model for mobilecrunch. Within the last few days it seems the comment posting is taking on the signs of an urgent community. Time to upgrade mobile Crunch into a social community.

My bet is the Basecamp discussion will reach 200 posts by the end of this weekend - Woo Yay. Any bets????

PS Basecamp is Kool and RoR is just rocking for the development of the interweb :0)

“Dumbfind will merge with Searchles in the next few months to create a search engine that crawls the web and is enhanced by its users (Dumbfind already has a search engine that crawls the web and automatically tags content)”

dumbfind is nicely designed however, it still too close to what others are doing. It is unique, don’t get me wrong, but doesn’t jump the curve needed to be adopted by the masses, imho anyways.
Still, glad to see that kind of innovation.

shawpy: sure, drop me an email - http://simpy.com/contact

shawpy I think so, knowledge is money and can generate money for those who have special knowledge. Like Google answer, or wondir and other sites that make a community of experts to answer to certain questions, I’m quit sure that making a specialized database of knowledge can be more reliable for people to search this information and have result from experts.

I also agree that these web 2.0 web sites like del.icio.us are not the answer for reliable information. Anyone can share any information with public. For me they are spam bookmarking sites. They are actually struggling to be profitable, some of them use google ads to have some cash. So I understand your point.

I give you Pytagor because it offers a community knowledge place with friends and friend’s friends. This concept can improve knowledge and avoid spam, so like you said valid information in a community. May be you can contact them and offer a partnership, they have the technology to implement your idea !

If one day I will be in Pytagor.com team, the first thing I will suggest is to change his name to PytaSter hihi!!

Sal,

We are trying to jump the curve, it is a 3 stage process though! Our big problem is that on the surface it does look like what others are doing, but (at Dumbfind) we have our own index, automatically tag all of our content, and then have a little trick up our sleeves for the tag search. Your tags don’t have to match exactly the tags we assign for each doc, we actually calculate the similarity at query time between the searched for tag and the tags associated with each result. This means a tag of “health” can be found to be similar to a tag of “surgery” or “doctor” or “medicine”. That is a complete paradigm shift from normal inverted indexing methodologies. I really need to start my own blog to explain this stuff better…

dumbfounder

http://dpforums.byethost14.com/dpforums

“Blue Dot is not just another social bookmarking system”

No, It IS just another social bookmarking system regardless of how many Ex-{insert corporation} employees it has working there.

For those comparing Blue Dot to Myspace, I’m wondering if you’ve ever used or been to either site. While they are both intended to connect friends, actual information sharing on Myspace is limited. In my opinion Myspace is more about posting your opinions/info and showing your friends, Blue Dot is about posting news and opinions and engaging in a diologue with friends. I don’t see anyone making this very huge distinction. I’m also perlexed by some negative comments about the design of Blue Dot compared to Myspace. Blue Dot is clean, simple, and functional. Anyone familiar with design would tell you that this is not an easy feat, it’s obvious that their designer is very experienced, with the huge debate about their 1.5 mil… I think it becomes apparent that their money is going into paying for their employees. Lastly, something I’ve noticed that nobody has mentioned… Blue Dot is ridiculously fast, you dot something and it will tell you to the second how long ago you posted..crazy, awesome! Whereas Myspace…..do I really need to explain how slow their site is?

http://www.bluedotmi.com/

Shawpy,

You’ve brought up some very interesting points. I would like to discuss these with you a bit more. Send me an email when you get a chance, rey at rmcomputerguy dot com

This is all just so depressing. Maybe I should move to Seattle. I have ZERO dollars, ZERO funding, a couple of aging desktops and a laptop. I built http://www.Linkatopia.com from scratch in ONE month (it still has some unfinished features but it does what I want it to do) and let’s see…
(1) I can make my links public, private, or “friends only”.
(2) I can enter MULTI-WORD tags so I can actually remember what a tag is for. Why doesn’t everyone give you that choice?
(3) I can add a comment to each tag, so other people will know what I use a particular tag for. My friends need these things!!
(4) I can make my TAGS private! I don’t want everyone to see all of my tags!! Yeah, for those ummm tags about ummm ya know…
(5) There’s a “cool web 2.0 popover” that appears on top of any other site. It’s not quite as slick looking as Blue Dot’s but mine works in Mac browsers. Oh and my popover lets me choose from my existing tags!!
(6) There’s an IM/chat system that works 100% of the time, does NOT require Flash or Java, and works over firewalls. Huh? Yes, its true!

Okay, so I’ll take one FIFTH of 1.5 mil, or $300,000. How bout it, anyone?

send emails to: rob at design215[dot]com and I’ll tell you where you can send the check. =)

Robert
That’s actually a pretty slick looking site! A little bare bones on features, but no ads, no membership plans, and makes good use of screen real estate.
Just a question - how do you plan on keeping it alive over the years?

I like reading about all these services, but fortunately I don’t have to try them all. Nobody beats del.icio.us’s push feature for syndicating. Every day it posts my links to my weblog, and my readers love it (many have told me so). It’s better than a widget because it stores an archive right there in my blog. Until somebody comes up with something similar, I’m sticking with del.icio.us.

What if you could have the ability to share your browsing experience with others in a private but also public way…

Putting together “dossiers” on things from the internet which are important to you…

Check out the link I provide aboce, those are some things which are important to me which I created right off of the web…

The point I’m trying to make is that now when we want to share a site we found with people we send links… why not piece out what is important and what you want THEM to see, and share it in a very unique way like above… Which, I may add can be emailed privately with a simple attachment…

Usually I like to ask people this question… Now when you do web research and want to share it with another party or person… how do you go about doing it? Paste links into an email with maybe some descriptions under each link is probably the most popular… But, how efficient is that?

There is much more to this and we’ve been having a difficult time trying to explaint the concept, but I know there’s something there… Our company is called infoGenome. We’re a small company with only one investor… Bill Campbell (Chairman of the Board at Intuit)…

If anyone is interested in learning more please email me at geno@infogenome.net…

Thanks!

Gene Brown

1.5 Mil?? Come on…With all the outsourcing out there they could easily cut down their budget to at least half that…or where is the 1.5 Mil going to?

@ Robert Giordano -

Hi robert, good job with your site!!!

I profile new websites on my site and I would like to profile your website on my site (hipfox.com) … maybe give you a little publicity.
Could you contact me via the “contact form” on my site and tell me a little bit more about Linkatopia?

Thanks.

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