Blockchalk is a new iPhone application that lets you leave messages or “chalks” on your street or wherever your are on top of a map-based interface. You can reply to other peoples messages and they can respond to yours. Basically it’s a location-based bulletin board service that overlays messages onto maps.
The new iPhone app lets you set a “home neighborhood” so you can be notified via the iPhone’s push notification service when there is a new message in your home vicinity, or if someone responds to one of your messages.
Created by Stephen Hood, the former product lead of del.ici.ous, and Stanford Institute of Design’s Dave Baggeroer, Blockchalk is also available as an HTML5 web app for the iPhone and Android, and as a native Palm webOS app that’ll work on the Pre and Pixi. Native apps for Android and Blackberry are in the works.
While Blockchalk doesn’t sound new or interesting at first, the way it differentiates itself from other LBS networking apps is that it doesn’t require any user registration whatsoever. While you can leave your personal information with chalks, you don’t have to and that may make Blockchalk appealing to those who aren’t entirely comfortable with the openness required by most LBS apps.
The company is currently looking for seed funding, according to VentureBeat, and if I was an investor I think I’d put some money here. What does everyone think? Would you?