ibeatyou is an upcoming social network with a focus on competitions. Here, you can compete against anybody for any reason. Cutest feet, best “open mouth” photo, ugliest dog, best tongue twister–you name it. The competitions are all user-generated, so you can start your own contest and invite your friends to join.
Creating a contest is very simple, though there are certain limitations to how each competition can be set up. It looks like you’ll have to choose a type of media for each competition, meaning it has to utilize either text, images or videos. Also, there’s no option for setting up a prize for the winner, which could diminish the incentive for gaining participants in the long-run, especially those that have been invited from outside the ibeatyou network and don’t have a vested interest in the community.
An interesting option for ibeatyou competitions, however, is the ability to set up an offline extension to a competition, which is the same as throwing an event. One good thing about ibeatyou is its attention to the networking capabilities that can occur around the competitive spirit. You can easily follow all the competitions your friends have submitted entries to, as well as those they’ve initiated.
Any user can be added as a friend or foe, and for any profile you come across, you can click on the “head-to-head” comparison button to see how the two of you stack up when pitted directly against each other. This option displays stats for how many competitions you’ve won when you’ve both been in the same competition.
ibeatyou, which has a seed round of investment from Prism VentureWorks, isn’t the first to launch with a user-generated contest application, so I think a few things like predictions for various competitions could potentially spice things up, especially on the spectator end. Additionally, considering the similarities user-generated contest sites like GoChongo have with poll sites, in terms of the ability to collect certain types of data and rally users around a given outcome, I’m rather surprised that so many of these contest sites, including ibeatyou, don’t have more interactive widgets for gaining comprehensive votes outside their own networks.
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