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Meshly - diggable IM bookmarking
RedWriteWeb points us to Meshly: an IM bookmarking service that takes del.icio.us, adds digg-style voting, and uses IM as a front end. Bookmarking on Meshly works by IM’ing a Meshly chatbot (AIM: meshly, GTalk: meshly@gmail.com, MSN: meshly@meshly.com), and entering simple commands to initiate a stream of prompts:
Pages that you bookmark through IM show up on the Meshly site in your user profile, and can be voted on my Meshly.com visitors:
Even the signup process takes place via IM:
The bottom line is that Meshly provides a well executed digg/delicious alternative with a gimmicky-yet-valuable twist in the use of IM as primary UI. Its fast and easy to use, and if you’re a regular IM user (I hit meebo a few times a day), it fits into your regular workflow nicely, and is about 10x faster to submit to than Digg. The MyMesh tab on the website (once you’re signed in) provides channel and tag indexing for your bookmarks, making for a similarly powerful user-experience as that provided by del.icio.us.
Josh Catone rightly suggested that the concept of channels and tags overlapped and created redundancy. I can see what Meshly intends (user created content areas), but along Josh’s thinking, I’m not sure why tags can’t form the basis of this. Del.icio.us makes a single layer folksonomy easy-to-use, so can Meshly. Josh also suggests adding a del.icio.us-style bookmarklet to enable people to use Meshly without IM; while it sounds good conceptually, doing so might dilute Meshly’s source of differentiation - I’m not sure if utility outweighs branding or not here. Meshly could also use a web sign-up - presently registration is only through IM client.
One other question I had was Meshly’s business model: If much of the Meshly activity takes place via IM, is their ability to advertise and make money compromised? I’d be curious to see a by-activity breakdown on del.icio.us traffic and see how big a slice Meshly is missing by going IM.
In any event, Meshly is hitting a chord and getting good coverage around the web. I think Twitter has really primed people for more in the way of “instant” services… prepare for more to come down the pipeline.
- Rexduffdixon suggests that with email overload becoming a hotbutton issue, IM may be ready to get more attention as an alternate transaction channel.
- Libraryclips suggests also taking another look at clipmarks, spurl, and netvouz.
- 901am compares Meshly to enabling digg-voting on every inane Twitter that you put out - personally, I don’t think the comparison applies, as Meshly is (for now) more bookmarking than just Twitter-babbling.
- Muhammad Saleem sums up Meshly as “not greater than the sum of its parts” - suggesting that all of its functionality is available elsewhere in more established services already.
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2 Responses to “Meshly - diggable IM bookmarking”
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I’m totally embarrassed to not have caught this thorough review before, but I’d like to comment on your points, as they are valid observations.
I understand the confusion regarding channels and tags and we’re working on clearing this up. It’s primarily a user interface problem at the moment, as I think the distinction is important and the value of the channel system is in keeping with Meshly’s concept.
Essentially, our core vision is to make Meshly the best possible way to exchange links within a community. Tags are a great way of labeling information and communicating a topic. The problem is that tags don’t really define a community. A community might be interested in any number of tags, and any particular tag may mean something different to different communities.
Additionally, we want to be able to give communities the tools they need to grow and foster the exchange of relevant information. So with voting, community members have an opportunity to control, to a degree, the kind of information they’d like to see.
That’s not to say that you can’t just use Meshly as a convenient way to bookmark things, or vote for things, but the potential for community building is really what distinguishes Meshly from the other, more established platforms.
If you’ve got 5 buddies in the office, you can make a channel and post things of your interest to it. If you’ve got a blog and you want a place for your readers to share links with you and vote on stuff they like, you can make a channel for that. You can have huge tech, science, or news communities, of course, but perhaps these are less interesting to some people. So Meshly lets people make that decision about how they want to be involved and what communities they want to be a participant in.
As for business model… man, I really don’t know. Meshly is the most convenient way for me to share bookmarks and discussion points with my friends, and everyone who uses it is getting a lot of value out of it, which makes me happy. I have a job that pays the bills so I guess I’m not worrying about Meshly’s monetary future until I’m done worrying about all the cool things I want to do to make it even better.
Thanks again for your review. I hope to see you again on Meshly!
Jason from Meshly