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Motion Based = Underwhelming April 18, 2007

I am training for the Helsinki Marathon in August with two friends in different parts of the world. We have all run together before but we are no longer in the same place. During previous runs we all became addicted to GPS watches to help with training and so we looked to Motion Based to allow us to share the GPS information from our runs with each other. So it can seem like we are running together or at least heckle each other despite our distance.

The idea behind Motion Based is great but sadly, the execution is horrible. I fault two things, their business model and their execution, which does not leave much to be excited about. Their business model follows lots of “Web 2.0″ sites by having a free service level and a pay service level. Their free site gives you so little functionality that it is not very useful. You can upload your GPS data and view your activities chronologically, but you can not sort by speed or distance. Sites like Flickr also have a free account but it gives you all of the interface functionality of the full service. Motion Based is also quite expensive. Since the free service is so limited, users are either going to pay the $96 yearly or $12 monthly fee or they will leave the service like I did. Full access to Flickr is only $25 per year.

And then there is the interface. Cluttered is a good description. Google ushered in the era of the clean interface but apparently Motion Based was not into that. Their site is hard to navigate and worse than that, hard to use. You can search for your friends GPS information, but the search tool is pretty awful. There is an advanced search too but each time you add a search parameter you have to “run a report”, something I have not had to do since I stopped using Microsoft Access in 1996.

I am tempted to start a competitor site to Motion Based on my own time. I can develop a cleaner interface with more value and a real database. Ultimately, that is the problem with Motion Based. Not enough value.