Online comics service Bitstrips will be one of the startups hoping to become SXSW Breakout App of 2008. In fact they responded to our Breakout Apps post by creating a special comic strip for ReadWriteWeb (see below). So what is Bitstrips? It’s an online comic strip that you can create and run as a series, kind of like a visual blog. I think this has a great chance of gaining traction, because a lot of people think visually and everyone enjoys comics.
Some of my buddies already run comic strips to great effect; e.g. check out Josh Porter’s tech-focused comics. Also an early blog friend of mine, Andrew Chen, used to run an excellent comic strip on cyber-ethical themes. So Bitstrips will make ‘comic blogging’ easy and encourage communities to form around them. Frankly I think it’s an awesome idea – there’s a good chance there will be latent demand for this, and it could go viral among the SXSW crowd and beyond.
Here’s the comic the Bitstrip editors did for us:
Bitstrip is rolling out a major upgrade tonight, in preparation for tomorrow’s “pre-launch” at SXSW – where they will send beta invites to hundreds of SXSWers. They also plan to “comic blog” the SXSW event.
What do you think? Will Bitstrip be the Breakout App we’re all looking for?
