Sulake Is Going For The Adult Market With Bobba Bar. Beer Anyone?
Sulake, the company behind the popular Habbo Hotel, a virtual world for teenagers with 14,600,000 montly unique visitors, has come out with a new service, Bobba Bar. Bobba Bar is virtual bar where, according to Sulake, you can meet and make friends. And it's not just any virtual bar, it's a virtual bar for 18-year-olds and over, so teenagers stay away.
Clearly, Sulake is going for a new market segment after conquering such a big chunk of the teen market with Habbo Hotel. I'm just not sure 
if big people will jump on the virtual world in the same way as teenagers have. I'm already realizing I spend way too much time in Facebook for no reason. Compared to wasting time in Facebook, Bobba takes a lot more effort is you plan to waste time there as well and I honestly just don't have any. After all, I have a Twitter to attend to.
Now, in all seriousness, I'm sure there are people who find Bobba to be for them, but I just don't think the number will ever get even close to the ballpark where Habbo Hotel plays in. That said, it might just well be that Sulake is just experimenting without any more expectations than I do regarding Bobba Bar, and if I'd be Sulake I would probably try it out as well given the success of casual games among adults. Sulake also touts the possibility to data people in the virtual bar, but its bit of a stretch to go there just to hit girls. Also, not surprisingly, in the near future Sulake plans to provide virtual content purchases inside Bobba Bar, so the business model is clearly there as well.
Bobba Bar has taken off nicely with some 45,000 accounts created in four days, but I wonder how many people come back after creating an account. I know I won't. I tried to service with Nokia E71 and the experience might be a whole lot different if you're using Bobba Bar with iPhone or iPod Touch. If you happen to own one I recommend heading to App Store to try it out (here). Me? I'll keep waiting until Apple works out the iPhone 3GS backlog and starts servicing its customers again in Finland by actually restocking its distributors.
There seems to be a quite big market for virtual adult hang outs with a certain level of anonymity - think IMVU and Second Life. In my opinion, Bobba is very promising take on that service area with a strong mobile focus.
Both Facebook and Twitter are operating in a totally different corner of social service space and lumping them together doesn't do justice to services like Bobba.
wow. Just logged int to bobba after a while. Looks like the number of visitors has more than tripled. Because of the iPhone app?
Teemu,
Well, yes and no. Roughly half of IMVU users are under 18 and Second Life on its part is bleeding users (currently around 370K monthly users based on Quantcast). Mobile focus is tight tho.
But you're right, Facebook and Twitter has nothing else similar with Bobba except that they fight for the time an adult user spends online.
Its surprising that the author mentioned iphone, but not any Nokia's touchscreen phone? Well, in any case, it works fine on my Nokia 5800.
Bobba bar was earlier just known as Bobba and it has been available on Nokia's Ovi store since quite a few days as far as i know, since i have used it few times. They just changed the name from Bobba to Bobba bar before 2 to 3 days.
There were not many users, when i had logged in, but most of the users at that time had one or another Nokia phone.
Hary,
Honestly, I really can't see why I should have mentioned Nokia's touchscreen phones. Nokia makes good phones as far as the hardware goes, but the touch screen nor the UI is not where they are strong. Really.
If you look at the 'See Also' just below the post, you can find our story on Bobba from when it was released in April 2009.
Hary,
I have not used N900 yet, which might or might not be up to bar with other Iphone and Droid touch screens.