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3bubbles is cool — but so what?
I hate to be a curmudgeon, but I just don’t see the point of something like 3bubbles.com, which Mike Arrington at TechCrunch profiled recently. I mean, my first response as a geek was hey, this is cool. Click on a link and see a little window pop up where you can chat in real time? That’s cool. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to agree with Pete Cashmore of Mashable, who says he’s skeptical, and Zoli Erdos, who is similarly unimpressed.
I could see a limited number of situations where real-time chat would come in handy, including when you’re looking for tech support on a website, which is one of the only places I’ve seen it before now. But on a regular blog? I don’t see it. Plus, as fellow Canadian Larry Borsato notes, chat kind of detracts from the commenting thing, which can be saved and viewed later by others. Would 3bubbles allow that? I don’t know. Maybe you could save the chats and then display them at some later point, like a conversation frozen in amber. I still prefer comments for a lot of reasons, as anyone who has read some of my previous posts will know.
Kent also wonders how many blogs would be able to sustain a chat conversation using 3bubbles, and answers “none.” And he notes that people sometimes “confuse a blue ribbon science project with a business.” An excellent point. I’m sure the gang at 3bubbles are just as nice as Stowe says they are, but if they came to me looking for financing, I would send them on their way. Not every cool idea is a viable business.
I could be wrong (it has been known to happen). Charlie O’Donnell of Union Square Ventures, who posted a comment here with a link to his own thoughts on the subject, thinks it could be the start of something big, but I remain skeptical. My friend Mark Evans thinks more than one cool Web 2.0 business suffers from the same problem: lots of cool, not much business.
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http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/2006/02/3bubb...
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Used by myspace, plentyoffish, americansingles etc. I have over 2000 people chatting at any given moment. At any rate userplane only makes around a million a year and i'm sure a huge portion of that goes to bandwidth and operational costs. Where is the money in this space?
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And Markus, I think your point is a good one. Online chat has been around for awhile at sites like yours, and even with a hard-core group of relationship and dating junkies (no offence) it's hard to see how to monetize it. With 3bubbles I think it would be even harder. At some point it has to come back to Jerry Maguire territory: "Show me the money."
Mathew
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Mathew
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