The Ideas Bazaar

A bunch of researchers

"How a bunch of Intel researchers, called ethnographers, came up with the innovations..." Tony Salvador explains more on thew work of the researchers and what they ended up with.... [there's more here - I like way this group uses You Tube]...

 

The Self Sustaining Serendipity Engine?

I don’t quite get Dopplr. Yet.

Maybe I’m missing something, maybe I’m looking too hard. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place. Or perhaps what I’m looking for (I don’t know what it is) is yet to be built.

First, let’s say this. Dopplr seems to be doing lots right. It is getting really good press and there’s no shortage of buzz around it. And, for sure, the team seem to have done much right. I liked the way they scaled gradually, using the law of cultural supply and demand to create some interest in Dopplr as it emerged from private beta to ‘corporate beta’, to ensure that it scaled as a platform and that each tweak and development worked. And it is an elegant thing. The UI and the copy is nice (although I’m not sure I get why people are waxing so lyrical about it). The Dopplr blog keeps the faithful in the know as the venture progresses. The Facebook app gives succour to those for whom FB is ‘the platform’ – the thing that made walled gardens respectable again. It syncs up with Flickr. And with iCal.

So there is much to be praised, admired, respected and probably copied. But still I have to say I’m not sure I get it yet. I can’t see what it’s adding to the sum total of my life experiences. I don’t see how it will make money and I don’t see how it is immunised against boredom. Let’s look at the buzz bit first.

There is no doubt that Dopplr is very much of the now. It is Web 2.0-ey and it plugs into meatspace / the real world of people/atoms. As a recent piece in The Economist pointed out, the meshing of web and world has never been more evident.

With Web 2.0 buzz is almost everything. Without critical mass there is no value, at two levels. One, if there is no buzz, there is no one there and if no one (friends, family or friends of friends etc) is there then there is little value in ‘me’ being there. Second, if there is no buzz then I won’t visit something – be it a website, or pay attention to it (in this case emails and alerts that something with some buzz entails. But when the buzz has burnt out, what’s left? The online remains of your identity festering on an unvisited piece of the web. Another site for which you can’t quite recall the password and email combination you used to register in the first place. An exodus to another place - witness the mass migration from Myspace to Facebook this year. What will be 2008’s Facebook?

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