GlobMe, Ready To Step In For Twitter or Brightkite?

One of the people on my must-read Twitter follow list posted a link to a site called GlobMe earlier today in response to the deluge of tweeted complaints that followed a day spent looking at the Fail Whale as well as the lack of a reply tab in recent days. Heck, even the Twitter powers-that-be were recommending users try to interface with Twitter through Summize for a while - hardly trust inspiring behavior from a company.

I was skeptical when I went to check out GlobMe. After all, Plurk was trying to bill itself as the next Twitter and as a timeline service, and we all know how much many of us seem to hate the whole Plurk experience. GlobMe is being described as a Twitter-style conversation service with timeline and maps. Interesting - Twitter meets Plurk meets Brightkite, perhaps? Intrigued, I went to check it out.

On first glance, the site looks engaging, widgetized, social and fun, like you would expect from a site directly competing with Twitter or Brightkite. As you dive in to play you discover that it flat out is not intuitive to use at all. It has an interface that makes you work far too hard for the minimal information you are trying to convey. This is a huge issue for me because of the minimal amount of time I have to devote to new services, but it is an issue that will make it hard for less social media savvy users to want to make the service part of their online day as well.

The crushing blow for this application came when I realized that it was actually more work than Plurk to use. That's right, GlobMe takes far more effort than Plurk, and that is saying a lot. As you all know, Plurk is one of my least favorite social media tools to come out in recent years. I didn't think there could be a site with a longer learning curve that took more effort to participate in, but GlobMe showed me that was a poor assumption on my part: in fact there can always be something harder.

To GlobMe's credit the response to an invite request was fairly prompt. I got the impression that much like Profy and the blogging beta invites used here, the invite was more of a formality - way of keeping an eye on scalability and tracking usage than an actual fence to keep people out. That, at least, was refreshing. Also, the overall look of the site is basic, but streamlined - another plus.

The focus of the site seems to be on the maps and events. That puts that portion of the site's functionality in direct competition with Brightkite. In fact, overall, I'd say this site is much more of a competitor for Brightkite in functionality and much less a Twitter-style global conversation tool. Even so, the site falls far short of the mark even when just comparing it to Brightkite.

With Brightkite, you have a truly simple interface to either add a note, change your location, post photos and interact with the map in other ways by simply taking the novel approach of typing in an address. Not only that, Brightkite shares your location with your Twitter stream and via FireEagle if you choose. GlobMe's map interaction was downright torture in comparison. Dragging and dropping a paddle icon around a map, with no way to make the search faster by using an address was a huge turn off.

Brightkite offers a variety of ways to add friends and search for new friends in a variety of easy to use ways. GlobMe only offers a Gmail import or individual email address invites right now; no Twitter, Pownce, or other list import functions. GlobMe also makes it exceedingly difficult to find people you want to add as contacts. Again it drags out the map and forces you to drag a paddle around search for events in an area. With no way to search for people it falls into the same traps Plurk fell into when it first started - difficulty adding people you want to connect with makes people abandon the site for easier to use places to play.

I think the thing that bugged me most about GlobMe in the end was how hard it was just to jot a quick note and stick it to a map. There were too many steps, too many forms to fill out, and nothing interesting happened to the information when you were done. If nothing else, Brightkite and Twitter have spoiled me forever with their ease of use and interactivity. Applications that don't make posting to them that quick and painless simply don't hold my interest anymore, especially if they are simple, one or two function concepts. It is too bad how much I disliked GlobMe - I wanted so much to like it. I think I'll be sticking with Brightkite and Twitter for now, though.