Where is iRovr going?
iRovr.com, a social media experiment launched on the iPhone/iPod Touch only, is having lots of trouble lately. It goes without saying that competition is hard these days in the social media sphere.
Legacy gone
The founder recently sent a message to all the iRovr users, both on the service and by e-mail, explaining that financial difficulties were forcing him to cut down on the service.
From now on, entries without comments won’t last more than 30 days on the server, to “cut the fat”
In line with the industry?
Well, the founder says that this decision is in line with the industry. It’s true to a certain point. But such a massive scale-back has other roots.
Lack of mass adoption first. iRovr.com was a great idea from the start, but what was touted as an iPhone-only experiment might also be the reason of it’s current slump. Most services do not rely on a single platform, they exist on the web, then branch out to the iPhone and other mobile platforms (usually with a simple web application in that latter case). iRovr doesn’t even have a web presence to market itself, making it even more difficult to attract users.
Lack of native application, secondly. With the success of the Apple handset, most services have started creating platform-specific applications (or relied on others to do so for Twitter). If Friendfeed and Plurk are the striking examples of tools not yet natively ported, they have some time on their side for they do not rely on the phone exclusively. iRovr doesn’t and hasn’t been able (for lack of Apple’s promise to blend web apps into a kind of MobileSafari less experience) or willing (for lack of money, certainly) to create one.
No ROI
If the iPhone-only approach clearly did cut iRovr.com from a whole market of users craving to use fun social network services, the monetization is the other big issue. With all current services scratching their heads about monetization (or having gone the way of massively attracting user to leverage future income), iRovr.com was never in a good place: the founder explained on an iRovr entry that the ads clickthrough, his only source of revenue, were paltry.
I’m personnaly sad to learn about iRovr’s woe, for it is very innovative and fun to use. If a good idea doesn’t always makes a good business, let’s hope, for competition sake, that the service doesn’t disappear altogether.
I’m papadimitriou on iRovr.
