On the Dopplr shift

Went to see Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones do a double act on Dopplr (Dopplgangers?) last night at the Design Museum. Dopplr has always interested me for 3 key reasons:

(i) Its a location based service - We've looked at these for clients (especially mobile clients) a number of times over the years, and by and large they have all underperformed hugely. Reason vary - lousy economics, intrusiveness, clunkiness. Thus its interesting to see how they are faring in this endeavour.

(ii) The social network they are building is for people who actually do want to meet - we have also done work on tracking services of various kinds, and again these have underperformed historically - ( I recall with wry amusement one focus group some years ago when parental enthusiasm for child tracking rapidly fell when it became apparent that any family adopting these would also have spouse tracking capability). Ditto, my experience of most SocNets is I don't mind friending some long-lost acquaintances, on the express understanding that I don't have to actually meet them.

(iii) Web 2.0 Design Disciplines - to me Dopplr are one of the poster children of the WebZen 2.0 design school, and its always interesting to get snippets of real life experience vs "the dogma"

Thus it is always interesting to study a company that is attempting both these service areas. Very interesting talk overall, some thoughts from the talk and chatting to the DopplMatts afterwards:

Is Dopplr a feature or a business? - Matt J noted that a few years ago it would undoubtedly have been a feature in someone else's portal, but the nature of the web now is that the whole web is an open portal in away, Dopplr is now a feature on this "metaportal" (my term). My take - I foresee the collation of these services with others such as Twitter to provide more vectors for the "social graph" to provide value.

On Scale and Scalability - the guys had made the point that Dopplr is aimed at the large scale - bouncing round the world - and not at the small scale (within cities etc) which they would hand off to others. My take - I get "getting what you do right" but if I were a funder and looking to scale it up over time, there must be a scale benefit from going small scale

Design of the Social Net - they have been very diligent with going from strong links out, and ensuring that unwanted links do not occur when exporting the Dopplr social graph outside. On this, Matt Jones pointed me to this slideset he had done earlier with Tom Coates which deals with the social net design thoughts - well worth a read.

Is Great Design more a UE thing or a Marketing thing? - answers have I none here, others have noted that great taste and Digerati acclaim historically is no guarantee of crossing the chasm ( Dopplr is like a software Apple, aesthetically beautiful ) but I also noted the guys talked about differentiation by getting many small details right - and that's the Japanese philosophy of Toyota et al

Great Design + Getting Little Things Right - is that the start of Zen and the Art of Software Maintenance

Incidentally, one topic that did come up over beer etc later on was the hardy perennial of "who owns my data" - ie why must Twitter, Dopplr, Flickr etc all have separate social graphs of their own. Prediction - big issue of 2009, along with how to program social nuance into social nets.