TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

Kevin Rose jumps on the Twitter-wagon

Om shares the non-news that Digg’s Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka are working on an IM-like Twitter competitor. Andy Beal, Rex Dixon, and Paris Lemon speculate further.

Speculative options include:

Digg-ified Twitter Clone: Voteable twitter posts, sounds a lot like Guy K.’s Truemors. Plus, why not just build an IM submit pipeline for Digg itself, like Meshly uses?
An actual IM competitor (as opposed to a twitter competitor): I have no idea what this might entail; IM is a weird anti-hype vortex - its huge, used by millions, monetizeable, etc., but by-and-large buzz & hype free. The digg-squad could be the crew to sex-up IM again - they’ve got the promo chutzpah and better-mousetrap ideas to make it happen.

Will it be one or the other or neither? Who knows! Hopefully whatever it is is a separate corporate entity so that it doesn’t get pulled down when the DMCA grim reaper comes knocking for Digg.

aim, digg, im, instantmessaging, jaiku, kevinrose, livemessenger, truemors twitter

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.