Archive for August, 2005

I saw info of the Gahbunga launch over at Techcrunch. Sounds very much like the Fotochatter app we saw during the Mobile Monday demo day. Not that I’m complaining, two companies working in largely the same direction normally means there’s some validity to the model they’re trying to fulfill on. Overall the mobile communications options are largely person to person. The applications that open up the communication to a larger group normally do it with a set of known friends and help you stay connected to them. They’re introverted for the most part. There’s a bunch of interest these days in extroverted mobile applications. Mobile social software (Nokia Sensor, 6th Sense, Bluedar) seem to be popping up all over the place. The Fotochatter method is interesting in that it lets you form a community with whom you share your images, rather than sending to one person. And it facilitates an ongoing discussion of that image. The Gahbunga app is more goal oriented however. It’s not just “images from friends” that you’ll be getting, but images of people that someone else is looking for help rating. It’s voyeuristic, the people doing the voting get to look at some hotties, and it’s instant. Sure has the makings of a great app there.

However they don’t seem to have put any thought into the starting problem. The problem with most social applications is that it’s hard to get a whole group of people in at once, and when people sign up one at a time they quickly get bored cause they have no friends in the system. I signed up and there was nothing, I don’t have any friends in there (not that I know of at least). Give folks an easier way to start out. When then first show up there should be interesting stuff for them right off the bat. I signed up. There were two checkboxes I could use: “I wish to get rated by the whole gahbunga community” and “I wish to help others rate their dates”. I toggled both of them, as far as I could tell nothing happened in the interface. I have no messages on my phone. Apparently I don’t even have a notification email at the address I signed up with. More more more! I like your idea, reward me for looking into it. I’m out of time now though, and I don’t have a positive association built up yet. Oops.

After I was joking just yesterday that it would be great to have a major player with an open IM platform, along comes speculation that the Google release will be a Jabber based IM service. I have to admit I’m pretty intrigued. I’ve always liked XMPP, the protocol underlying Jabber. There have been all sorts of disputes about licenses and patents and who has the right to use what. And there are lots of XML purists out there who think that using streamed XML makes you a servant of Satan. But I thought XMPP took some great principles and blended them together. In particular, allowing for namespace divsion of messages and advertisement of capabilities in a way that was decoupled from the underlying transport. Just like, well, that whole internet thing. Deploying a new application on the Internet doesn’t require protocol changes to the core routers, and deploying a new application on top of Jabber doesn’t require changes to the core servers. I like that, I think that’s the way it should be. If Google deploys messaging services that build on those principles I’ll have to give them at least a little bit of respect. I think that would be a really fantastic and strong play.