Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com ]

21/04/09 Irish Tuesday Push: LoopThing.com

DUBLIN, IRELAND - The Tuesday Push is a way for the tech community in Ireland to make some noise about ourselves by highlighting Irish products every second Tuesday. This week the Tuesday Push is LoopThing.

Loopthing allows every business to come online and network with one another, as well as providing customers with detailed information on their products or services.

I won’t tell you something’s great that isn’t, and so with the Tuesday Push, I’ve always tried to be brutally honest with a hope that my feedback is useful to the company. Straight off, I don’t get LoopThing. I don’t see which problem it is solving. My business feels no pain in which it prevents or eases.

I’ve taken into account this is a soft-launch. I signed up as an individual - but I don’t understand what I’m meant to be doing on it, nothing is leading me through the process. I hit a roadblock waiting for a confirmation email to arrive, I couldn’t continue until I checked my mail. There is no on-screen guidance, I have a dashboard that says ‘Welcome’, and gives me options to edit my profile in many ways.

Ok, I now seem to have an internal messaging system - not sure what was wrong with my own email account. Why do I need another? I search for some businesses and find ‘LoopThing’ themselves, I see businesses can upload media files, have comments made, be contacted, list their business hours, etc.

I can favourite a business (why?). I can see top rated ‘this week’, ‘this month’, ‘all time’, pictures, audio, and videos uploaded by businesses (why?). I can list business by ‘top rated’ or ‘most commented’ (why?).

I know some of the lads - we met at TechLudd Cork (I think). I’d say the underlying technology is great - it just needs to find its niche, and have a tighter user experience. I can’t see the business model (do you pay for highlighted listings or is their advertising?).

So I see it like this -

Their product is ‘me’, us, you, and all other people with wallets who want to buy something. LoopThing’s product is delivering us to the businesses who sign-up. Therefore they need to attract us to the site in the masses without having to register. How? Solve that. And the answer is not just good SEO, it’s serious strategy - a unique feature where I plug-in “plumber near Howth” and it fires me back ranked ‘by my network’ options I could go for. Something much cleverer than this example is needed to stand out from the cloud.

Off the top of my head - I’d market it far more like “get your own business website”, and make each site quite customisable by each business owner. But with instant powerful tools - more a replacement for a website rather than a business listing.

Fair play for getting it out the gates. Hardest part done. It isn’t easy to launch any app, so good job.

-Robin.

(Image Credit: Last Wednesday, author pretending to be involved in an accident on the deck of a trawler for the local rescue team to train. Evacuated by confidence line up pier ladder.)

Tags: ireland, irish, loopthing, push, tuesday push

2 Comments

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21/04/09 Tuesday Push : Loopthing from Joseph Kelly | Gordon Murray

[...] been reading Robin Blandfords Tuesday Push about Loopthing too. Robin points out that Loopthing need to find their niche. I think thats true, [...]

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22/04/09 Robert Synnott

It appears to be… oh dear god, no, another social network.

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