ScribbleLive: Two Guys In Canada Launch Sweet Liveblogging Platform

yeah this ajax stuff is good! cant wait untill the rest of sites such as facebook etc implement ajax to eliminate refreshing and connection losses..

How does it compare to CoverItLive.com, which I’ve used several times in the past and DOES have an embeddable widget, as well as in-line commenting from readers?

sweet this is something i am going to use all the time. Live blogging is such a good idea.

http://gamepver.com

Nice write up! THis sounds pretty cool, interesting to see how it actually works!

so its just like one way chatting with fancy text and pre-css-formatted chat messages. takes me back to the geocities chat days. *sigh*

Its good to see another amazing tech company from vancouver come up with a great product.

Keep us updated with Mesh, Erick. It’s become a great event

Welcome to Toronto Erick. Don’t leave before we make sure you have a good time!

Good to see people keep pushing in this area despite the success of twitter & co.

Peter
do you follow me @ http://twitter.com/peterurban

Well, CrunchGear used CoverItLive for an Apple keynote, and it there was a horrible 15-minute lag. They supposedly fixed it. ScribbleLive has not been tested at that sort of scale, but the founders say that it is built so that it can be hosted on Akamai or another CDN for big events.

Hey Doug were actually in Toronto but Jonathan grew up out west. Thanks for the comment.

Cheers

just an idea for the guys to think about adding - can your scribble live blog page be more about you and less about scribble…things like the header/title/etc. so that it looks like YOUR own live blog and not a SCribble blog that oh by the way has your text and pics and vid?

great work,
thanks

It might be sweet, but it sure is hard to use. Requires a login?

If you want to see a much simpler way to accomplish the same thing, go look at http://backnoise.com

Because we don’t use proprietary server technology, we can scale up our hosting grid (which is build on GoGrid computing cloud) *and* slap a CDN in front of it. We can scale as much as needed around big events.

@Doug: We’re actually from Toronto, but please don’t hate us

Eric, I am at Mesh right now and part of the “community” panel at 1:30. How do we meet? Can you come by the panel?

Regards,
George

This would be sweet on TechCrunch for the Apple live keynotes….

@Mike: We’re hop’n We’re making sure the platform is scalable for an event of that size *HINT*

What’s the difference between this and using a wordpress blog to blog about an event? The only difference I see is that the the content is displayed much faster but with less features to edit the content. Basic HTML wasn’t allowed when I tested it. Also People can’t comment on each post.

Timing is probably the difference here. If someone wants fast updates to their blog, then ScribbleLive would be best. If they just want to blog about a segment of their day or the entire day then Wordpress is still better.

MR: Try the tool. It’s fundamentally different than blogging.

i was going to make a joke about the exchange rate on $1500 then i got confused and gave up.

@MR: Among a slew of other features, we aimed to solve the eternal debate: should live blogs be newest->oldest or oldest->newest You get the choice when you login (via FB, MSN, or OpenID btw).

Gotta love those bootstrapped startups! Great idea, but it does seem a bit different from standard blogging.

Thanks for blogging about what these guys are doing. I first used it back in March and I love the idea of collaborative live blogging. Plus I love that their tool supports photos & video embeds. It’s an awesome platform, I’m glad TechCrunch covered it.

If you’re at Mesh, try this out : http://backnoise.com/mesh

Thanks for the comments guys. Just to let you know, we are not the next WordPress. This tool is more about events in your life. You go to a concert or a conference, and you want to invite your colleges to contribute to the event or the last episode of Lost is on and you and your friends what to discuss as the plot unfolds. Or think of it as Twitter on steroids.

Cheers

Oh, BTW…you will be able to embed it on your blog very soon.

Any word on how scalable this is so far? I know a major issue with hosted live-blogging has been scalability during conferences and things. Everyone seems to try twitter once, and it invariably crashes and ruins the event. I’ve been working on a wordpress plugin (obligatory holding/signup page at http://www.wpliveblog.com/ while it’s in development) that might have a similar feature set to ScribbleLive, but like most developer’s I’m lazy enough to abandon it if ScribbleLive scratches the same itch and won’t crash during the next Apple event or what-have-you.

The guy that said this is the same as Backnoise.com you’re way off. Backnoise adds new notes every 30 seconds, and during an event I would we way behind. Any person that knows a little about ajax, and writing a simple message daemon could pull off what backnoise did.

Scribblelive is cool, and if it can scale I think will be a great tool.

Founders: Any business model in terms of future revenue?

-Ryan

Looks like the next big thing after Twitter in this space!
But wait, does it let me put my google ads in there?

#29 Ryan

Google ads, as usual:
http://www.scribblelive.com/Thread.aspx?Id=473

#18
“@Mike: We’re hop’n We’re making sure the platform is scalable for an event of that size *HINT*”

BullS**t

http://i31.tinypic.com/vi1pae.jpg

@Anand: Did you get that went you tried to upload an image because we had hit a cap on Amazon S3 (fyi, how many buckets you can have) and had to tweak things a bit. It should be working now but if not, please drop me a line at jonathan(a|t)scribblelive.com and I’d love to see where you got that.

When I talk about scalability, I’m talking about having the ability to grow our server environment as our traffic grows. We do that in 2 ways: 1) we are hosting on a virtual server grid so we can throw more machines on when we need to and 2) we built everything to be ready for a CDN when we can afford one. We’re just 2 dudes working on this in our spare time, so despite having a lot of experience with large-scale/high-availability apps, we still need some cold hard cash sometimes

Thanks for checking us out!

Scribble, entertainment, maybe, usefulness, doubtful. I would much rather spend my time reading something well thought out and written.

Sounds like it’s another CoveritLive. What makes it different other than Crunchgear’s one bad experience? Used CiL several times with no problems.

@Bryan: We think liveblogging is great (and fun) and there’s definitely room out there for both of us. But we took a different approach to it than the fine folks at CIL.

CIL created a nice Flash widget to go on your site with a tonne of neat features. We were more focussed on the full-browser experience, and integrating with the right “Web 2.0″ websites to make it as easy and efficient as possible to liveblog an event. For example, we don’t ask you to create an account at all; just use your Facebook, MSN, or OpenID accounts. You or your friends can send posts, including photos and videos, in from your iPhone or Blackberry.

We really took the experience we have integrating with open-standards, and brought that into the DNA of our product. And we’re going to push ScribbleLive in the direction that the market demands with an embedded feature and Twitter integration coming shortly.

Thanks for checking us out!

I’m thinking you missed the entire point of backnoise then, Ryan. Take another look.

This space is white hot.

Wait to you see what I’m busting out with ASAP.This is a good shot and I’m going to use it but I got it going on a full blast of 3.0 want some look me UP.
It’s a great time to be a BLOGGER for real.Thanks for ALL the great things I learned reading this site.I may just have to break you off a piece.
One of you guys is sitting in my chair:)

@Johnathan

No. I came across that trying to access a live blog page that I had created. The site looks cool, anyway. Congrats guys..

This has already been done by http://www.shopandsave.com

But the website looks great and will use it very nice

i can not believe the things people think are interesting or that have an audience. scribblelive is just a tag board. it’s a guest book. it’s a chatroom wanna-be. the desperate use of ajax/web2.0/immersive/fullscreen buzzwords is ridiculous. this venture is pitiful and doomed, not necessarily in that order.

@Scott Nellé: Hey Scott, I saw your post about your wpliveblog plugin, and I was definitely interested in what you’re cooking up. We’re really eager to integrate with Wordpress (and everyone else who wants us *hint* Twitter).

I wrote an Alpha feature (we took off before the TC story hit) that will send liveblog entries to Wordpress via XML-RPC, as well as an embedding feature that would pull down live-updates in real time.

What sort of WP integration were you thinking about? Any interest in doing a wpliveblog+ScribbleLive mashup?

If not, no worries and good luck on wpliveblog! I signed up for updates and look forward to checking out your alpha.

Cheers!

–Jonathan

Nice site, but there are a number of ways to do this kind of thing.

For us, it’s called Wordpress and Prologue. The trick is using the tools to attract a niche audience (not to mention getting featured on TC) as we are planning for the fantasy sports sector at sportstwit.com. Cheers…

@Scot: Weird, I was actually just checking out the Prologue WP theme yesterday. It looks great; kinda like the lovechild of a Tumblelog and Twitter

We are really focussed on capturing live events, and making it as easy as possible for publishers to blog them, and the audience to follow along. Between the 2 of us, hopefully there’s enough blogging going on out there

@Jonathan: Give me a shout off our site. I’d like to chat with you about Scribble. We’re Canadian too.