The document discusses Dopplr, a travel planning tool that utilizes social information from other users. It focuses on how social tools should move beyond just "friending" and focus more broadly on how people interact in various social roles. The document advocates exploring how social software can better reflect the full spectrum of casual social interactions that take place in physical environments and enhance the "health" of both real and online social spaces.

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I’m assuming that many of you will have played with Dopplr, or
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hopefully are happy users! At least I’m hoping you’re familiar with
it, as I’m not going to pitch you... but I would like to set the
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This diagram shows the ‘lightcone’ of the future and the past of
an individual ‘observer’ - future, which happens if you
is about the Dopplr is about what you can’t
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haveautomate take it
this view and (yet)
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optimisenext?travel plans based on those of others. That’s why
we’re called Dopplr - alluding to the Doppler effect as things
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approach and recede from you.
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3. http://www.dopplr.com/group/picnic-08
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4. “For the world
to be interesting,
you have to be
manipulating it
all the time.”
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Everything begins with an E(no) - Heʼs probably our patron
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saint!
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As a service, our goal is to add our valuable information to the
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coral reef of the real-time social web that people already inhabit.
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But... how’s the reef doing lately?
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6. <rant>
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I can’t help thinking that collectively we’ve taken our eyes of the
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prize in the last year or two.
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I’d been thinking this for a while, but some stuff lately really made
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me think hard about what we’re all designing and building. BTW
- this is not to pick on FriendFeed. They are very clever people,
but... next?
Where
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8. You’re kidding, right?
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More Merlin... I love his pronouncement on the ‘fake follow’
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feature: “this is a major breakthrough in the makebelieve
friendship space”
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Although - his call for a ‘pause’ button is something I think a lot
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of us could relate to. We have “mute” on Dopplr, which we think
is more about your relationship to a flow of information, not a
person.

10. <rant>
Friending
considered
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harmful.
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What does that terrible neologism ‘friending’ mean
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anyway? Do you even need to tell computers who
your friends are to get the benefits of the social web?
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BTW - can
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videogame?

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For Dopplr, we have been careful to use language and
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controls that are explicitly about sharing information, rather
than ‘making friends’.
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12. Asymmetry
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We made sure that weren’t obligated to share information,
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just because someone else had shared with you. By avoiding
the language of ‘friendship’, something like this doesn’t feel
as awkward.
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14. Friend is not
the only social
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role
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But as I say - “friend” is not the only social role we
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play, and it’s not the only thing that social tools
should focus on IMHO.
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For example: this is part of Intel Research Berkeley’s “Familiar Strangers” work, looking at the
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patterns forming from regular, casual contact in the urban environment.
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And it’s this casual, social interaction with objects which
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there’s still so much mileage in. For instance, whether it’s
dog-eared pages of books...
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Our tools... (this is bruce sterling’s keyboard)
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or our environments
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“Wear and tear” is often how mental models get out into the world. Incidentally, the movie is
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of a machine my friend Jack Schulze built to record the way that people draw maps to explain
directions to other people. [Will Hill and other talked about “edit read” and “wear read” back
in 1992. ]
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This is a map from the collection of the National Maritime Museum,
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where successive explorers annotated new opportunities, theories
and obstacles on the same map over several expeditions over the
course of several years.
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Under glass, no wear-and-tear... no collective intelligence worn in...
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Bungie let players see ‘Heatmaps’ online of where thousands and thousands of
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players of HALO3 died on different levels - allowing them to visualise
strategies for the game. E.g. “Kills with the Gravity Hammer in Rat’s Nest”...
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This is Citysense, which takes these heatmaps of the city onto a mobile screen - I’m guessing
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that Adam Greenfield will be talking a lot more about this sort of thing in his talk at Picnic.
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24. </rant>
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This complex spectrum of social roles is essential in our
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physical social environments, the original real-time social
web. The health of cities depends on it, as Jane Jacobs and
other point out to us. And the health of the social web
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depends on it.
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We need to widen our exploration of social software again
from ‘software for making friends’ to “software that’s better
because there’s people there”.

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Thanks! DOPPLR
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mj@dopplr.com
http://www.dopplr.com
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