Being kept “in the loop” usually means you want to receive information but not necessarily exchange it. A company called Loopnote allows people to stay in the loop on any given topic by subscribing to one-way information updates.
Loopnote launched in public beta today. It is a service that allows users to join groups and receive regular information updates from the moderator of that group. Founder Alan Seideman gave me a demo last week and explained way too many scenarios in which this would be useful.
Say you are a member of a volleyball league and you want to be privy to real-time game updates. You can subscribe to the league’s loop and decide if you want updates via RSS, SMS, email, IM, or all four. So if a game is rained out, the moderator can send a cancellation message to the entire group.
Only the moderator of a loop can send alerts and thankfully the members of the group cannot reply to all.
“We may allow the reply-to-all feature in the future if the loop owner chooses to allow that but then you run into some issues with spam,” Seideman said. “The group SMS services are for small groups of friends. But with Loopnote, I don’t really need to have a dialogue with all 250 people in my volleyball league.”
Seideman actually does moderate a volleyball loop, which is why that was his favorite example. But I can also see this being useful for several scenarios, and not just activity organization. What if a notable professor whose work I want to follow sets up a Loopnote? I can see myself activating an RSS feed to read journal articles or other information he/she posts.
“You find something that you’re an expert in and get people in the loop,” Seideman said.
I really like that you can choose how you want to be notified. It seems pretty unobtrusive. The reply-to-all feature of the group text services such as Zemble and Yahoo’s new Mixd is something I want zero to do with personally.
Loopnote is a free service, but regular text fees apply of course. Currently, you can give the site your email address and they will invite you to the beta. The three founders have a few possible profit models in mind that they hope to follow but they are not married to a single one yet until they observe just how the product is used by those who sign up for the beta. Possible profit generators include contextual advertising or commercial sponsorship of loops.
And how is this service significantly different from existing established services like Google or Yahoo! Groups, which have settings you can toggle to use them as a service similar to LoopNote?
Don’t get me wrong. I love and encourage the development of entrepreneurship… but re-inventing the wheel and calling it your own is hardly what I’d call innovation. We need fresh, new ideas to push us into the next decade (or make the Web 2.0 bubble grow even bigger, if you will).
Is this much different than creating a group page on a social network, or than creating a blog and letting others subscribe? Maybe I’m missing something. I guess I just don’t see myself publishing using this service, but if someone I know sets up a “Loop”, I certainly would be happy to subscribe.
The simplicity sounds appealing, it just sounds like it would be difficult to gain a critical mass given the plethora of competitors.
BTW - I tried to post a silly little “pikipimped” picture of you Natali, but for some reason it didn’t come through. Was I blacklisted from techcrunch (I hope not, I love this site!), or is this site now moderating comments?
Joe, you seem to miss a big point: entrepreneurs don’t care if they’re reinventing the wheel or repainting it or making a whole new one. We seem to confuse social work with entrepreneurship here at techcrunch. Bad idea.
Another point: similar service does not mean SAME service. So if YOU know a way to “hack” google to work as loopnote works, it doesn’t mean millions of others know that. A lot of us need tools to be presented in the simplest form before we adopt it - that is why reinventing a wheel with more recognizable paint can at times work wonders in getting you users:)
It is the same way I totally understand why there are 60 something youtube like sites with many more starting. While most of them will flop - a COUPLE of them WILL make millions(if not billion). That’s a pretty decent pool to be in(2/60) if I’m a startup.
I was thinking the same thing. I honestly do not see the point of this. Seems like just yet again another site for users to set up yet again another account just to be lost on the web.
When I read it like the previous commenter’s, sounds pretty much like a group page to me. I really just do not see any mass appeal on this and how is it supposed to be monetized?
Anif, if they can build a mass userbase, monetizing might be easier than you think. What you have are users who TRUST emails you send them and probably READ those emails - because they care about what they signed up for.
This lets you pitch attentative users to advertisers who pay you attach something at the bottom of alerts LoopNote sends out to its users.
This is just ONE way.
Who plays volleyball on grass?
Zaid: I just don’t see a point, or a future, for such ’similar’ services which fail to distinctly differentiate themselves and offer value-added services to the community. Ideas which have made it big have always been fresh, creative ones. What’s worst is that LoopNote is a one-sided affair.. i’m not sure if it even qualifies as Web 2.0, given the lack of social interaction with the portal. Google could easily crush LoopNote with a bit of polishing. It’s got the resources, and more importantly the market share.
Well…I don’t think this is good. coz there are so many way could make it happen, nothing unique.
http://www.ezecho.com
Thanks everyone for your comments so far. We had a lot of the same concerns when we started thinking about this but realized that what we were trying to do was new. Loopnote “loops” are different from traditional online groups in a number of ways. While it’s true that many groups can and should use Yahoo or Google groups to “stay in the loop”, loopnote is intended for easy one-way broadcasts of important messages. It’s also a much more organic way for people to stay in the loop about things they care about. Rather than be personally invited to an online group and share your personal information with others, loopnote lets complete strangers form loosely held bonds based on common interests. We think it’s much more practical for the everyday person. Alerts (notes as we call them) are intended to be short and to the point, they’re headlines in a way. Some of the functionality Martin built (IM integration for example) is also totally new. Bottom line is though, and someone mentioned this earlier, the service is easy to use. We spent a lot of time with Brady working on the style of the site. We intentionally set out to build something that was easier and more fun to use than what’s currently out there. We hope you’ll try it out.
Alan: Any chance you could setup a guest account? I’m actually beginning to realise how this service may be different…
The question here is:- to what extent are founders/owners of such services responsible to prevent (or encourage) the dilution of the social networking scene? Does this do more harm to the community than it does good? Should we work towards building and bridging consolidated one-stop portals?
Something to think about.
Ok, here’s my comment on this and several other posts posted by the same writer. Please don’t get me wrong, but I feel that the writer in TC should analyze more on the companies that’s been covered. The questions that are raised above like “hows different from yahoo groups” are very valid, simple questions !! But these were not answered in the analysis at all.. What we would like to see is a post written by the writer that has done extensive analysis and then share his/her opinions on them (by giving valid supporting points)
Hi Joe - the site is actually in public beta so you’re more than welcome to go and sign up. As far as living alongside social networking sites out there, that’s a really excellent point. Our goal is to be sort of the “engine inside”. We’re already working on ways that loopnote notifications could be integrated into people’s MySpace experience. We’re not trying to create yet another social network. If anything we’re trying to make existing social networks that much more useful.
Alan,
I think you need to work more on your Marketing message and competitive advantage , as its not clear now.
I absolutely agree with Faisal on better publicising your competitive advantage. Essentially, why should the average Joe (pardon the irony ;)) pick LoopNote, instead of the tried and tested? That question’s much easier for a fresh service like Zamzar for example.
Beyond this, I wish you the very best of luck. This site has a nice feel to it. I’m not UI guru, but my instincts tell me that you’ve got the infrastructure in place, exactly where they should be.
Well I for one am extremely happy about this, because I started a reference site not too long ago for midwestern skateboarding and it has done significantly well (as far as a skateboarding site goes), but I now have the first skateboarding loop on loopnote and this is just another way to come up in organic search results. I also love that it is will have the mobile alert feature and hopefully it will be tailored so that each loopnote loop will be able to create its own rss feed.
Thanks
Its a coo idea. Especially the SMS service. Im sure if they market it right, scores of the myspace kiddies will jump on it (concerts, hangouts, sports events) Very cool
Its a cool idea. Especially the SMS service. Im sure if they market it right, scores of the myspace kiddies will jump on it (concerts, hangouts, sports events).
Mailing list manager 2.0, differentiated by IM?
This does nothing that hasn’t been possible with mailman/majordomo/ezmlm for many years. Before Topica became SpamCannon, Inc. they even offered this to the unwashed public in the form of an announce-only list.
The state of innovation is so very depressing.
Please tell me that this is bootstrapped. Surely there’s no smart money behind it. Right? Right?
I agree with what #11, Tim, is saying. I would like to see more analysis spent on the unique qualities of the service/product in comparison with the competition.
Now, I appreciate the writing in the post. Of course I do. I’m just saying a little more planned research before a piece - googling the technologies and the competitors, spending a few hours with the competitors sites, just letting things sink in - could not hurt..
And in cases like this, when you are demo:d in advance, it might also be good to ask a few questions in that situation, then go home and research some more and then make sure to return to the company for some more in depth questions. You probably think about - and plan for - this and a million other things too, but it can’t hurt to reminded about once in a while, right?
I am surprised that no one has mentioned meetup.com; Meetup does an excellent job for people within a meetup group to interact; I myself started a groupmingle meetup 7 days ago and it is very well designedfor organizer to promote, communicate etc.
Then I realized that loopnote is not trying to be a group site. The purpose is for “expert” to keep all others in the loop. Founders said “we wanted alerts that could be created by real people”, it appeard to me that you want it to be a Digg for “happening” alert, (as opposed to news). But, if you only let “expert” to keep others in the loop, how to reach Digg’s social effect? Digg only needs 5% of its user actually contribute to digging news and it became massive; l oopnote can not affort the luxury. Why? Because keeping people in the loop is almost a “JOB”, unlike digg’s gossip news which is easy to submit for a well read person. In fact, you will find very few experts will be happy to do just that without getting reward.
My gut feeling is: good, they want to be social media. There is a chance. The design is good. (forget about the features, features is technology, technology is not big issue). Unless people in a loop could all contribute willingly, it’ll be tough.
Well, so is startup itself. My startup groupmingle.com got only 20 member in 4 weeks; but there is a bright side, our 7 days old meetup group already had first group dating for singles and have 30 memeber till now. It’s all about fine tuning the machine! Don’t give up.
If Loopnote can take care of SMSes, I’m going to be saving more than few bucks a month that it costs me currently to sms 10-15 friends daily as we’re about to begin our evening game of cricket at UNC.
-Zaid
Alan, I like the site design. Do you mind telling me who designed it?
I think the majority of the comments on this post are pretty inane. Just because you can name a service that does something vaguely similar to a new service does not make this one invaluable.
I can’t think of any other service that would make it easy for one or more people to blast out text messages to a group of interested parties. Now, I’m sure that something like this exists - but that doesn’t make this service less valuable to me.
Sure, there are things out there like Twitter and RSS Feeds, but I’m 100% sure that there is plenty of room on the interweb for services that make it easy for people to communicate in different ways.
as i was reading this I also wondered why this isn’t already happening with Yahoo! Groups. Y groups is essentially a message board where one can subscribe to the updates. They choose to receive messages from more than the moderator b/c that is what is valuable. it is possible to just hear from the moderator, of course. another web 2.0 feature, not a company.
I think they have a solid idea, marketed incorrectly as a “Web 2.0″ product. There is a need for this type of tool for league/club/event organizers, but I don’t think there’s anything inherently social about one-way notifications. They ARE useful however.
I run a sports league that plays in 4 different cities and times and we built our own notification system for sending out SMSs with game status updates (rain outs, etc). It has been heavily utilized by our participants and they love the system. Our SMS system is a nice tool for getting our job done as organizers, and Loopnote looks to be the same for similar situations.
Group programs like this need to cross into a multi-group, mulit-source format. If a user belongs to one group, chances are they belong to multiple. If a user leads a group, chances are the they lead (or have a propensity to) other groups.
This makes it easy on the group leader and on the group member but silver bullet comes when one-way communication is supplemented with basic interactivity to make participation effortless. Otherwise, this might just be a way to send mass communications and that might be fine for some groups.
Monetizing is key too. A lot of interested stuff going on in this space. Good stuff guys.