Blue Dot Popular in Japan
Posted on August 21, 2006
Blue Dot is a new web service that combines social networking and social bookmarking features. Blue Dot said in a recent press release that its website has been popular in Japan and that five of the top ten users of Blue Dot were Japanese.
There are several reasons that Blue Dot may be particularly appealing to Japanese users. Blue Dot was designed from the outset to be friendly to an international audience. Text can be entered in any character set, including Japanese characters. Blue Dot is also designed to be more graphical than other bookmarking sites, making use of thumbnail images from the source Web page to enhance the presentation of the bookmark. In addition, blogging in Japan is very popular, even more so than in the United States. Blue Dot creates a user profile much like a blog in that a user's most recent entries are displayed on the user's profile page.If you look at a few Blue Dot users dots you can see the dot entries are organized in a blogish pattern. We think Blue Dot is likely to become one of the more popular social websites here in the U.S. as well. Blue Dot has received positive reviews from TechCrunch and Mashable. Recent features added to the site include personal messaging, comments tracking and activity notification.Blue Dot users around the globe can create Dots about anything they find on the Web -- news, events, videos, music, restaurants, and other Web sites. Blue Dot's patent-pending technology also enables users to add comments, select an image from the source Web page, categorize, and rank Dots as they are created. Once saved, all Dots are organized and displayed in a searchable online collection. Blue Dot can also be integrated into blogs or social networking sites to keep personal pages fresh with very little effort.