Before you assume it is Facebook, it isn’t. In fact, over the last year, social networks are becoming almost as common as porn on the web. All sorts of niche markets or slightly different variations on a theme are out there.
I’ve been trying out as many as I can and one stands out above the rest for me at the moment. But first, I remember when I first signed up to Facebook, it wasn’t much, you could message, write on a wall, upload a photo or 2, and that was about it. No API, not really any apps. I simply didn’t get it. Then it got better. The secret to looking through social networks is not to say “this is crap” straight away, but to see what potential it might have over the other networks out there, and what it might be able to do in the future.
Anyway, my favourite at the moment is Dopplr. Matt Biddulph and crew are doing a sterling job,. Dopplr caters for people who travel, mainly for business, it can be personal too (which is what I use it for of course). Over time it is improving slowly but surely.
I liked the idea at first, of putting my journeys into Dopplr and it being able to be imported into my Google calendar. Not hugely useful, but I liked it. I also liked the idea of seeing where friends are going, and, if they are in the same area, meeting for a drink (this has happened once, but hey). Thus, it was a bit of a bonus to have an account (I love the simple design too, excellent).
Then they added the journal function. Now what I love about this is that it now hooks into flickr. So any photo I take while in specified country will be added to the details of my journey, a nice little addition, and starting to add a nice diary like thing, in fact, it is starting to become a travel hub. Imagine if you could have a diary there for each day? Or even (unfortunately unlikely, but hey) be able to check in online from there? Now we start to see a fully centralised travel hub, very useful indeed.
So well done Dopplr, keep up the good work. It may not be as big as facebook, it serves a different function entirely. And to everyone else, before Facebook there was Myspace, before that there was Friendster and Orkut, before that was… Geocities, I think. Just wait for functions to come out before scathing reviews, because if a programmer can do it, chances are, it will eventually appear in a really cool way.
