Will Brightkite Succeed Where Dodgeball Failed?
Posted by Nick O'Neill on May 2nd, 2008 4:49 PM
Back in 2005, Dodgeball.com which at the time was a rapidly growing company was snapped up by Google. By 2007 the developers called it quits and ended up leaving Google with some negative words for the global behemoth, “It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us – especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.”
What did Dodgeball.com do? Well pretty much the same thing Brightkite.com does: let’s you know where people in your network are located. The benefit of BrightKite.com is when you check in to the system with your location, you are occasionally notified if there are other people in your network within a given radius. I tried it out but unfortunately when I tried to check in for the first time via text, I couldn’t figure out what to type. It didn’t understand what I was typing in.
I think that was more of me not understanding how the system works but honestly it should have been able to find the restaurant I was at by me providing the restaurant name, city and state. One of the major downfalls of DodgeBall.com previously was that it didn’t work for cities that were more spread out. Perhaps that was because there weren’t enough people in the network.
Whatever the reason was, Brightkite could very well suffer the same fate as Dodgeball. The founders don’t seem to think so though. Nor do the investors in the company. This is another company that has come out of the Denver area and was part of the highly successful TechStars program. My guess is that this team has a good chance of success but I’m still not sure how they’ll solve the problem of wide spanning cities.
One last challenge that I see for this company is the problem of dealing with large convention centers and college campuses. We want to be able to specify our location within areas that share the same address. Ultimately, my guess is that they’ll eventually integrate GPS into the phone. Have you used the program? Do you find a lot of utility in it?
May 2nd, 2008 at 3:58 pm
I've been using it or a few weeks now. I'm not thrilled with their mobile functionality. I wish that instead of being SMS based, it acted more like a mobile facebook of sorts. The whole point afterall is to use it on your wireless device.
Additionally, I wish it had more sharing options outside of just twitter. Zannel for example lets you post to twitter and facebook mobile at the same time.
Good Post!
May 2nd, 2008 at 4:42 pm
I've used it a few times and I like it because it is location+twitter+pownce.
Now all it needs is a conversation feature such as the @username in twitter.
May 2nd, 2008 at 4:56 pm
The reason it's primarily SMS is that anybody can use it, with pretty much any mobile phone. No fancy phone needed, no loyalty to any particular carrier needed.
They have an iPhone app too, which I'm assuming will be available when the iPhone app store launches.
May 2nd, 2008 at 4:58 pm
I’ve been using it or a few weeks now. I’m not thrilled with their mobile functionality. I wish that instead of being SMS based, it acted more like a mobile facebook of sorts. The whole point afterall is to use it on your wireless device.
Additionally, I wish it had more sharing options outside of just twitter. Zannel for example lets you post to twitter and facebook mobile at the same time.
Good Post!
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Nick, what is it about wide-spanning cities that makes them such a problem? For a network growing virally through personal contacts, I would expect to see pockets of people relatively close together using the service. Any dense downtown-type area is great for this.
The expectation, of course, is that it will very soon be commonplace to have phones with gps, and of course that will be supported as much as possible (the native iPhone application already uses the phone's location features). But when getting into this space, it is a smart move to start early with the technology everybody already has in their hands. And that is SMS.
It's also surprisingly easy to do the common tasks once you set up some placemarks for yourself. You send a message like “@work” when you arrive at work, “@park” when you stop by your local park for some frisbee after work, etc.
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:42 pm
I’ve used it a few times and I like it because it is location+twitter+pownce.
Now all it needs is a conversation feature such as the @username in twitter.
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:56 pm
The reason it’s primarily SMS is that anybody can use it, with pretty much any mobile phone. No fancy phone needed, no loyalty to any particular carrier needed.
They have an iPhone app too, which I’m assuming will be available when the iPhone app store launches.
May 2nd, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Nick, what is it about wide-spanning cities that makes them such a problem? For a network growing virally through personal contacts, I would expect to see pockets of people relatively close together using the service. Any dense downtown-type area is great for this.
The expectation, of course, is that it will very soon be commonplace to have phones with gps, and of course that will be supported as much as possible (the native iPhone application already uses the phone’s location features). But when getting into this space, it is a smart move to start early with the technology everybody already has in their hands. And that is SMS.
It’s also surprisingly easy to do the common tasks once you set up some placemarks for yourself. You send a message like “@work” when you arrive at work, “@park” when you stop by your local park for some frisbee after work, etc.
May 4th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
For me it's more… *sigh* just one more app that I have to use.
May 4th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
For me it’s more… *sigh* just one more app that I have to use.
May 4th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
I've written about Brightkite a few times already and have had the opportunity to communicate regularly with Martin and Brady, Co-Founders, via Twitter and Brightkite. These guys are pretty darn smart.
A few things…
They launched the private beta just a few weeks ago, and it's already spreading like wildfire. They told me that they wanted to launch now to get feedback immediately, but that they're planning on introducing all types of new functionality in the coming months, including GPS support.
I'm actually one of a few people beta testing the iPhone app, which is pretty awesome and I'll blog about it as soon as I get the okay from them. They're also working on mobile apps for other phones too, including Google's Android.
The SMS commands are cool, but there are a ton. One trick, “? business name” returns all businesses/addresses near your last check-in (and you can then check-in using the results returned). I use this all the time, sometimes to cheat and just find the address of a business for other purposes.
My interview with Martin May is here:
http://www.startupsd.net/137/brightkite-localiz...
It should be interesting to see what happens in the next few months
May 4th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
I’ve written about Brightkite a few times already and have had the opportunity to communicate regularly with Martin and Brady, Co-Founders, via Twitter and Brightkite. These guys are pretty darn smart.
A few things…
They launched the private beta just a few weeks ago, and it’s already spreading like wildfire. They told me that they wanted to launch now to get feedback immediately, but that they’re planning on introducing all types of new functionality in the coming months, including GPS support.
I’m actually one of a few people beta testing the iPhone app, which is pretty awesome and I’ll blog about it as soon as I get the okay from them. They’re also working on mobile apps for other phones too, including Google’s Android.
The SMS commands are cool, but there are a ton. One trick, “? business name” returns all businesses/addresses near your last check-in (and you can then check-in using the results returned). I use this all the time, sometimes to cheat and just find the address of a business for other purposes.
My interview with Martin May is here:
http://www.startupsd.net/137/brightkite-localized-social-networking
It should be interesting to see what happens in the next few months
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:52 am
[…] in May I wrote about Brightkite and asked whether or not Brightkite would be able to overcome the hurdles that Dodgeball […]