Finally, The Internet As Intended.

My mom doesn’t get "social bookmarking". Most of my clients need an hour long personal tour of del.icio.us before any lightbulbs go off. Blue Dot lifts the geek veil, adds rounded corners and a buddy list, and just might make social bookmarking useful for the rest of us.

How’d they do it? The mechanics of BlueDot are almost identical to del.ico.us, what del.icio.us calls bookmarks, Bluedot calls dots. Registered users use an IE toolbar or a Firefox bookmarklet to "dot" pages of interest as they surf the web.  You can see your friends dots, and your friends automatically see yours. You can discover both friends and dots through tags. All sounds so familiar, right?

The magic isn’t in the friend list and ‘containers’, as Benzinger at SolutionWatch suggests. The magic is in explaining the service sans geekery.

Bluedot keeps the interface simple, but not cryptic, and has done a fantastic job of explaining the service without web2.0 buzzwords or geekery.  I would encourage anyone building a web2.0 application to sit through the 3 minutes flash demo of BlueDots service as an example of how to explain a web2.0 app to your audience who doesn’t give a hoot about web2.0.

Will it work? I don’t know. But a quick scan of the popular tags on Bluedot vs the popular tags on Del.icio.us seems to suggest that it certainly is appealing to the mainstream, not the geekstream.