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7 August 2007
The complexity of locality; and why 'good' often isn't enough
Posted by Paul Miller at August 7, 2007 05:10 PM
Before I go any further, I should make it clear that this post is not intended as a criticism of Dopplr. Rather, I'm using Dopplr as a handy example of a wider problem in the expectation that many readers of a blog like this one are already on Dopplr and seeing the same issues for themselves.
To quote from Dopplr's About page;
“Dopplr is an online service for frequent travellers. It was created by an international team of world travellers. We saw a need for this kind of service, but discovered that no one was offering it. So we did it ourselves, and are delighted that other people are liking it as much as we do.
If you travel more than five times a year and have friends who do as well, then Dopplr is for you.
How does Dopplr work? It lets you share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you're planning to visit.”
Dopplr is great. You tell it where you're going and it lets you know if any of your friends and acquaintances will be in the same place at the same time. It also does a reasonable job of tracking down contacts from some of the other social networks you're likely to already inhabit. One tiny little gripe would be that the two-way granting of permissions seems to lead many users to forget that just because they can see my trips doesn't mean I can see theirs in return. [All the yellow people in the image can see me. I can't see them]. Yes, I'm fully aware that the intention is good, and that some of these people might consciously be choosing not to share their information. But I'm also aware that most people I've mentioned this to claimed not to have known that the relationship wasn't reciprocal by default.
Now to the bigger point; that of 'locality'. Dopplr appears to rely upon the explicit naming of points in space. However, we all know that geography doesn't really work that way, and that named points ('towns', 'cities') run together and spread in all sorts of complex organic ways. These points can also be physically close to one another. One Dopplr traveller, for example, might have a trip to Leeds. Another might have a trip to Bradford at the same time. Can Dopplr tell them that they are close to one another, or does it only deal with them being in the same place?
'Close' is, of course, not a constant either. The fact that a reasonably accessible contact of mine is now 100 miles away instead of 150 is probably not worthy of mention. The fact that an acquaintance from Australia is only a few hundred miles away in London might be both noteworthy and deserving of a train ride to London on my part.
So how do we evolve this first generation of reasonably useful social networking tools (of which Dopplr is one example), to make them understand and reflect the realities of the real world and the people who inhabit it, without seeing us drown in a sudden flood of almost-intelligent behaviour?
If you are on Dopplr and want to connect, I'm him, not him [shock! horror! Someone stole my name!]. If you're not yet on Dopplr and would like to be, just ask nicely for an invite...
And maybe we should all start logging major airports through which we pass as Dopplr destinations? I might be travelling from somewhere obscure where nobody else goes, to somewhere equally obscure and unvisited, but I might pass through Heathrow, O'Hare and assorted other hubs en route... and the number of times that I have bumped into acquaintances in airport departure halls suggests that there may very well be more likelihood of meeting people there (if only I knew to look for them) than in any town or city I might care to visit. So how about it, Dopplr-gang? Is there scope for a “passing through”-type addition to your trip creation screen?
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