At its core, Twitter is supposed to be a micro-presence service that invites users to answer the question, “What are you doing?”. That’s all well and good, but most people tend to ignore this question entirely, Tweeting about anecdotes, their favorite songs, and any number of other things totally unrelated to what they’re actually doing. It’s become a service for entertainment, news, and conversations, where those presence statuses (messages like “I’m at work”) have become frowned upon for being dreadfully boring.
They may be boring, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful. Quub, a new service launching tonight, is looking to fill the gap between Twitter’s status updates and the location-based services offered by the likes of Loopt and Google Latitude. The service’s primary purpose is to help users tell their friends what they’re actually doing, and while it shares some similarities with Twitter (including a 140 character limit), there are some key distinctions that help Quub stand on its own.
The first main difference is that all relationships on Quub are two-way. That is, you’ll have to send a friend request (and have it accepted) before you can view someone’s updates. The service also has support for groups, which means you can selectively send out your current status updates to a specific list of people (you can drag and drop users between groups much as you would songs in iTunes).
The other major difference is the way Quub helps you actually write your status updates. Quub knows that most people repeat similar tasks on a day to day basis, and pays attention to your previous status updates to help you build any updates in the future. These suggestions appear as floating text in a bubble beneath the entry field, so while you still have the option of filling in each action manually, you can also click on the suggestions to build your update in a few seconds. This may not matter much on the web client (you’d probably only save a few seconds versus typing the update yourself), but the service is also going to launch a fleet of mobile applications for the iPhone, Android, and other devices, where the suggestions will definitely come in handy. These updates are sent to your Quub friends, and can also be syndicated to a variety of services like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.
When it comes to browsing your friends’ status updates, Quub offers a handful of different modes. The first is ‘Present’, which shows the most recent location update from each of your contacts (the resulting list looks similar to foursquare, without the game aspect). A ‘Past’ view offers a Twitter-like stream of all of your friends’ recent updates. And finally, there will be a ‘Future’ view, which allows users to time-stamp updates. The ‘future’ mode is handy because it can also be used as a basic calendar function.
Quub has opted to forgo allowing users to post their exact GPS coordinates (which they deem to be too creepy), and instead leave it up to the user to announce where they are in their message. Unfortunately, Quub has not yet partnered with any databases to help users match their current position to nearby points of interest, so you’ll have to input each location you visit manually at first.
Quub has a solid idea and is well designed, but it’s going to face a few big challenges. For one, many people are already on Twitter, and it may be hard to convince them use another micro-messaging service. Granted, Quub serves a different purpose, with more granular privacy controls and intelligent message suggestions, but it shares so many similarities with Twitter that people may not understand the difference. And unlike foursquare, which has a neat gaming aspect, Quub has nothing to drive you to pull out your phone and update your status frequently. Finally, there’s also the problem that plagues all such location-based services: they’re only useful if your friends are on them, and it’s going to be a long uphill battle to reach critical mass.
Super cool twitter-killer. I like Twitter but would love a more sophisticated “Twitter” like this. Some features I like are 1. Drag n Drop option, 2. Present, Past and Future. And then, the facility to actually focus on what you are doing.
But competition is going to be skyrocketing. Is the Quub team strong enough to manage it?
I’m sorry, but “…presence service”?? Something is wrong with the world when companies on Internet (or better yet, anywhere) asking to know my personal thoughts and my ‘presence’.
Has this been lost on anyone as of yet? I get the feeling the overwhelming answer is “No!”
Craziness, I tell you…utter craziness.
But is that not the basic demand placed on you from Twitter? Though users have made the site an information sharing platform, basically Twitter was created to let the world know “what are you doing”. Even Facebook’s “what’s on your mind” is just that, right?
I have to agree with you. What value is this?
Twitter is conversation… Shouting in a room. Is this “Here I am” but with no context or reason?
Never seen a website so slow. I like analyzing website performance, but since I just do it on a single system so cannot be highly reliable but this is an approx. performance analysis. Here’s a breif stat:
Server: Amazon EC2
Loading home page: 14.95sec to 40sec (sometimes even 50-60sec, sould not be considered tough).
# of request after caching: 42 (that is too many for people who dont know)
Updating your status:
* Time: 2 – 10sec.
* No check for spaces. (ie, if you give a space in all three fields it will accept it as you status)
* You can put scripts in you status message, for example: alert(’test’) And this will show an alert on the browser.
I guess there’s a lot things that this website need to fix before the real launch.
Regards,
Website Analyzer
If you’re interested in evaluating our site at isayusay.net for networking thru Let’sTalk and social mail, I’ll be happy to give you a test account. We’re going to release it for open beta tomorrow.
Twitter evolved. No one gives a crap what you’re doing…… there is no value in me or most people reading that.
The sad thing is people on twitter still post stuff like – At coffee house thinking about joomla and drupl. (who gives a crap!) No value in that. It’s sad to see my friends post ‘what they are doing’ when in reality, no one cares in general because it has no value.
True, where we and what we do now does not anymore matter to others just as things about others matter to us. Twitter is just for information sharing…whereeas this is about information acquisition. But still I wonder if people will be longtime attracted to it.
Yes Twitter evolved into a service where entering what you’re doing is ridiculed, and it’s mainly because it’s such a public system. We obviously don’t care about the physical presence of a stranger, unless that stranger is a celebrity.
But to people we interact with in real life, knowing each other’s real-time physical presence is pretty cool. It allows you to reduce interruptions, coordinate with each other, negotiate availability, etc. Not necessarily entertaining, but useful.
maybe you guys should better vet a site before commenting on it:
Proxy Error
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET /.
Reason: Error reading from remote server
Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.6 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.8g Server at http://www.quub.com Port 80
OMG, is there a real server error? That too during the launch period.
Site is unresponsive, tried just now. FAIL.
Tried myself. Too bad. They don’t know how to run a site without errors? Twitter is better. It works at least.
Sorry, did not anticipate this much traffic from one post. Bringing up more servers as we speak. Growing pains… =(
It was about time that people start creating twitter like applications. It was bound to happen. Technologically it is not a challenge.
you clearly don’t understand the technical challenges..
I think its high time Arrington renamed this blog as ‘TwitterCrunch’ .. sad to see 99 twitter posts out of 100 sorry posts.
yucks.
Ha, ha, ha nice suggestion.
reduce him to 140 characters too
What are you doing?
I am having sex. Please don’t interrupt.
This service would be very intrusive.
Intrusive only when you want it to be. You choose who you want to broadcast that status to.
That status might come in handy for your roommate to stay out of the way for the night.
Jason, you managed to write an opening paragraph that talks about Twitter more than Quub. In fact, you didn’t even mention the name “Quub” until the second paragraph. Bury the lede much?
Anyway, I wouldn’t mind a twitter-like service that skipped all the “here’s a kewl link” and “everybody pray we don’t get swine flu” crap, but I don’t think it will work.
What do I think will happen? It’ll get plugged into services like ping.fm, and most of Quub’s lusers will be people echoing the same “here’s a kewl link” crap they’re posting to Twitter. In other words, Quub’s going to end up like Brightkite: a service where a significant portion of early adopters will intentionally ignore the features that distinguish it from Twitter.
If there ends up being no functional difference between Quub and Twitter, there’s no reason for casual users to sign on. Quub’s pretty much doomed to fail.
(Also, how am I supposed to pronounce “Quub?” Is that like “cube” or “qwub?” These damn startups need to use pronouncable names! It’s not going to help adoption if users end up calling the site by different names!)
Twitter killer ? I dont think so. Twitter will always have the first-mover advantage.
Why would I require another Twitter? I hate companies that copy-cat successful concepts and build few features on top of that. Twitter is not just a micro-messaging service, but a platform where people exchange tons of valuable information in real time. That paves the way for a great real-time search service. I guess the best company so far in this space is http://www.boilingpage.com that shows the hottest pages on the web based on how popular they are in Twitter. Quite a powerful service, I like such companies, not the copy-cats of twitter.
Twitter is great to broadcast something witty to the world whereas quub would be broadcasting my daily routines to my circle of friends. Or where I am having a meeting to only my work friends since they would be the only ones that would care about that information. It is actually very different from twitter.
Name calling a site without trying it out first might put the site you’re promoting in a bad light.
Another Internet-based time sink, as if we needed yet more of them…
I think a lot of you are missing the point, or didn’t read the article thoroughly. The point of Quub is not to be a better twitter, it’s an attempt to usher in a new era of internet and cellphone use. Imagine you whip out your blackberry and call your friend. He’s supposed to pick you up in 10 minutes and he’s not answering his phone. You’re worried and you start panicking. Now instead imagine, you whip out your blackberry and you go to your Quub app and see that your friend posted that he was running a quick errand before picking up his friend. It’s a mediocre example but you get the picture. Anyways, thats what i got out of the article.
“What you’re doing” didn’t work on Twitter because it’s not something one broadcasts to followers. Where it *is* useful, is appended to location data (like Latitude does) because “What you’re doing” follows closely “Where you’re at”. So I think not being location-centric is a pretty big draw back…
this is a more boring version of twitter
it lacks the “open source” conversation element that most people dig about twitter.. the ability to jump in and out of conversations with whom ever you like, whenever you like
I don’t want to have an ongoing relationship with friends on Quub when I can have a one night stand every night on twitter…
@BrendanBiryla
Come to isayusay.net for an interesting binding of Let’sTalk and social mail. For instance, you can post an announcement to Twitter to get the global exposure, such as
http://isayusay...blymacbbaaahufc
which will always display the latest content.
We’ll be in open beta tomorrow.
I am not convinced. It is on facebook philosphy. Facebook users are using twitter but why facebook users will use quibb.
fooey
Yet Another Twitter Clone? I am probably too tired to try it out. I will probably wait for a few months and see if it gets any word or buzz going for itself.
Taxi drivers, pizza-delivery, route sales person, or the likes could use the service. Quub should provide a database for each of such business-use customer of the service. Good luck.
Will it be blocked by the Chinese Government after plurk?
Will it also be blocked by the Chinese Government soon after plurk?
…gonna check it out…
Tweeting that you’re eating breakfast is boring, even if that’s what you’re doing. Describing what’s on your plate is a bit more entertaining. There’s nothing wrong with tweeting anecdotes. After all an anecdote is “a short account of a particular incident or event of an interesting or amusing nature, often biographical.” Which is exactly “what I’m doing”. I could honestly don’t care if you twitter on the shitter. But I do care to find out how it turns out.
I don’t see how many people would choose this over Twitter. The two-way relationship is just like setting a Twitter profile as private. And the help with writing statuses doesn’t add that much value… it won’t convert users already on other micro-blogging platforms.
Another me too concept?
First impressions of the service, seem to be some what restrictive, with regard to adding people and no indication of a real time search functionality across all users.
Needs more innovation to make any significant traction. It feels like my facebook status updates being shoved into another app.
“That is, you’ll have to send a friend request (and have it accepted) before you can view someone’s updates.”
So isn’t it just IM without the messages? Why “micro” presence service? It sounds exactly like and xmpp presence server, for example, with its own fancy UI for making up your presence state information.
Great observation. quub did begin as a way to help you update your IM status with presence information more frequently, much like XMPP. But Internet users are no longer just tied to their computers, so a new type of mobile presence management service is needed.
So use a Mobile IM client on you phone instead. Why build a new website to do it?
Because this one has an AI built in providing you a simple click and go template for status update to multiple platforms. Updating status is easier than ever. They even have research from the UCI professor to back it up!
Quub???
Literally laughing as I write this.
Not passing judgement on the product, but that choice of name is very humorous (at least to me).
Quub and Cuil my two, all-time, “what were they think” names.
Who cares. How will they generate revenue?
Sometimes its hard to understand and interpret value system.. why? Because its subjective… I dont use twitter neither any of my friends. But people are slowly building meaningful clouds surrounding twitter which probably makes sense to a few.
Only time will prove if its just a fad. AOL had millions of users when they launched, they still exist but how many of us use.
LMAO
quub.com? why not quuub.com? why not qub.com?
quub.com, what a crappy domain.
Twitter is way much better and easier to remember.
QB.com sounds better LOL
wondering why i need to get a more structured, simpler, easier to use twitter. perhaps it will give me time for some of my other (related) endeavors __ http://web-poet...009/05/04/quub/