Blue Dot Launches Partner Program, Adds DOS’s MZ to Advisory Board

by Marshall Kirkpatrick on October 6, 2006

I took a trip to Seattle last night to attend the Venture All Stars event and catch up on the startup scene in the area. Robert Scoble was there too so watch for video interviews on Scobleshow in the future. The most intriguing thing I saw were some new developments from Seattle startup Blue Dot. We first profiled this social bookmarking and networking service when it launched at Gnomedex. Blue Dot scores high on accessibility and smart features - their newest move being one more example.

Perhaps the most interesting news about Blue Dot though is the addition of new investor Mark Zbikowski to the company’s Board of Advisors. Zbikowski is one of only a handful of people (including Gates and Balmer) to have worked at Microsoft for 25 years and he’s the designer of the DOS executable file format (.EXE). Zbikowski’s initials MZ are in the header of every .EXE file. He’s just one of many heavy hitters backing Blue Dot, other investors include former Starbucks Senior VP Don Valencia and former Microsoft Senior VP Richard Fade. It’s interesting to note that Blue Dot, a company with so many elite backers, has a non-hierarchical structure among its employees.

Blue Dot has also launched what it calls its “partner program” to allow off site publishers to place “Dot this” links after each story on their sites. That’s not unusual, but the way the company is implementing the program is important because it ought to be obvious. I think Blue Dot has implemented the most frictionless and accessible way to get new users participating in a bookmarking community that I’ve seen yet.

The key is that Blue Dot is useful to readers immediately without registering for an account. Readers who click on the Blue Dot link to save an article on a partner site see a small pop up box from which they are able to send that article by email to anyone. The article is saved in an account automatically created for them without registering for Blue Dot. A cookie on the browser associates the user with that account and an email is sent to introduce Blue Dot’s full feature set and direct them back to the Blue Dot site to read friends’ comments about the emailed item.

The pop up box keeps readers on the partner site and has a more extensive explanation of the service that appears when the top bar of the box is hovered over.

The end result is that Blue Dot is the easiest social bookmarking service to start using immediately without filling out an account registration. It mystifies me that the links for other social bookmarking services on publisher sites are useless until you’ve created an account. The code to put a Dot This button on your site is here.

This is just one of many things that aren’t necessarily uncommon but that Blue Dot is doing particularly well. They also allow users to change the colors of the Blue Dot page, import their archives from Del.icio.us and automatically Dot all the posts in their own blogs off site.

A number of new features and partnerships are in the works that if successful will integrate Blue Dot in some high profile sites around the web. This is definitely a company to watch. Microsoft spawned social networking site Wallop is better funded, but I find Blue Dot more compelling because its services seem more useful even if they are less Flashy.

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Startups.in/India - October 6th, 2006 at 2:20 pm PDT

Just amazing to see how stuff that we take for granted can be further improved. Thought del.ico.us and digg got it right..but well no, looks bluedot took it further. Well done.

Bryan - October 6th, 2006 at 2:28 pm PDT

What I need now is a mashup to bring together all of my bookmarks from delicious, digg, stumbleupon, and now blue dot. Id also like it to be a firefox extension so that I can see all my bookmarks in a sidebar.

Drama 2.0 - October 6th, 2006 at 2:30 pm PDT

Very true, startups.in, but in the back of my mind I have to ask “Just what are they competing for?” Social bookmarking is hot within the Web 2.0 community, but Digg and del.icio.us are still fairly niche and mostly unused by the general Internet population. When you look at the bigger picture, these are nifty tools but as businesses, I just don’t know that there’s enough here to warrant significant attention, investment, etc. I could be wrong, of course, but these are so easy to build and the market so small (for now) that I wonder if some of these people wouldn’t be better off working on things that have more potential and usefulness, especially since Digg and others have a wide lead. It looks like Blue Dot has a great implementation and has beat the incumbents to the punch in several areas, but when you’re building a better mousetrap you’re still in the position of having to convince the market that yours is better and hope that they buy it.

Startups.in/India - October 6th, 2006 at 2:45 pm PDT

Drama2.0, BlueDot’s USP, IMO, is that it also has a nifty social networking app weaved into social bookmarking. To me it seems like del.icio.us/digg + linkedin, all in one. That is definitely powerful.

Chris - October 6th, 2006 at 3:29 pm PDT

I like the whole idea of Bluedot but I have been using it for awhile and my usage has been reduced more and more. The code they use for their bookmarking window is sooooo slow to load and it locks up the process of the browser until it is done loading that it is basically unusable.

I am sticking to stumbleupon and trailfire.

Billy Gisher - October 6th, 2006 at 4:39 pm PDT

I hate to jump off topic, but go to CNN and see if you can find the Google, YouTube story they ran on you guys. I put in a search on Cnn and got zilch. I put in the mars rover story and it came up ok. I check on foley and older stuff came up that was not on the front page. But the story on Google buying youTube that mentioned techcrunch is gone, vanished. Sorry I commented about the scandal and got you guys erased, but now maybe you can see the lengths Cnn and other media have gone to kill any trace of the story we are covering. We no longer have a free press. Just imagine how many stories that implicate the companies that own these so-called press outfits have smothered. Scary stuff.

Mark - October 6th, 2006 at 4:41 pm PDT

This is a pretty good idea by BlueDot. I hope they do well.

Alex Iskold - October 6th, 2006 at 4:58 pm PDT

Bryan,

Its called blueorganizer, we do it (not yet all) at http://www.adaptiveblue.com.
Another question is why are you using all these different services

Alex

AS Ali - October 6th, 2006 at 11:27 pm PDT

Another favorite and links share social network, dumping data pollution into the net. So I guess the main requirement to have people dump crap - is to come up with a nice Lego color combo and write in big fonts and we all be amazed by this non-sense and accept this as the next iteration of the WEB.

Nice - as if we didn’t have enough blogs dumping intellectual pollution - now we are making homes for these late night surfing fools to upload their links.

Go ahead - best thing is that this craze will come to an end too, and we shall go back to watching flash adverts from large media company and web will become the teenager haven to dump their hormonal expressions backed by ‘by the people’ mission logo.

Every developer that lost their jobs to India is now in this game. Thanks Ruby on Rails.

I love freedom.

John Swapceinski - October 7th, 2006 at 7:08 am PDT

Remember back in 1999 when there were 5 different companies competing in the “e-vite space”? 5 different companies all struggling mightily to take over a “market” where there was no money. Sound familiar?

And to the guy who wants an extension for aggregating his delicious, digg, stumbleupon, and blue dot links, you might want to try Firefox’s nifty “Bookmark this page” feature.

Amit Chowdhry - October 7th, 2006 at 7:58 am PDT

I think how its cool how a lot of businesses that startup in Seattle somehow are connected to Microsoft, which is known to employ people with a strong background in technical and business expertise. MZ will be a great addition to the Board.

skeptic - October 7th, 2006 at 3:36 pm PDT

Marshall, I’m surprised that you’re so excited BlueDot. Have you actually tried using it? Or was it only the impressive presentation? What they did looks like an act of desperation to me. BlueDot is not achieving much growth since their release back in July (http://www.alexaholic.com/bluedot.us) so now they’re trying to eliminate the need for registration in hope of getting more users. It won’t work. I used BlueDot for a while and didn’t find it interesting at all. It’s not a good bookmarking utility like delicious and not a good social network like friendster or facebook. They have too many developers, managers, and investors; their costs are too high; and they don’t have the growth. They won’t survive too long if they don’t make a dramatic change.

Jim Meyer - October 8th, 2006 at 2:18 am PDT

Social bookmarking services, a least in its current incarnation, have a long long way to go before they even begin to appeal to the average internet user. Ask yourselves, would you recommend a social bookmarking service to members of your family or non-tech-savy friends?

I’m not saying that we, and the average internet user, don’t need to save and keep the stuff we like, it’s just that the current services require too much effort and time, something which we all have too little of.

We’ll be seeing a new generation of more intelligent and automated services before widespread adoption is even a possibility.

AkelloDWT - October 9th, 2006 at 2:35 am PDT

On tablets how many are harmful to growing thin?
I hate myself for the sizes.
Whether it is valid, what they can cause irreversible damage to health?
Now show on TV much as people become invalids as a result of treatment.

[url=http://surfingusa.info/]surfing[/url]

Yossi Goldlust - October 9th, 2006 at 9:43 am PDT

Furl has offered a feature to let people save pages without having an account for more than 18 months

http://www.furl.net/storeIt.js.....h.articles

John Girard - October 9th, 2006 at 10:31 pm PDT

We’ve had this precise functionality running on pretty big sites (like CNN) since, oh, about 1999

Check it for yourself at http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/.....index.html — click on the “Save This” link.

The implementation is not web 2.0′d out, but gets the job done..

What we discovered 6 years ago, and I suspect most of these guys will realize at some point or another, is that there is no big business here. It’s a good, solid, small business, yes, and important functionality, but not destined for bigness.

Corvida - October 11th, 2006 at 8:36 pm PDT

I don’t see the point of these social bookmarking services. Quite frankly, if there’s something I want my friends to know about, I’d be forced to simply tell them in person or show them on my own laptop because they don’t use the internet like I do. I don’t know of any people that use the internet like I do. I see no point in having soo many sites like this and if it’s really that important for me to share my links with my friends, I’ll simply email it to them. No point in remembering yet another username and password.

I think that’s the only thing I do like about this site; no logins required.