ok…

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.

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.

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.

-Zaid

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.

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?

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?

Thanks

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.

I think you need to work more on your Marketing message and competitive advantage , as its not clear now.