I receive a weekly email from travel social networking site Dopplr telling me all about people’s trips. Sadly, these are people (spam bots?) I don’t know or really care about. How did that happen?? Here’s how I imagine it happened…
Dopplr-tard: “Let’s get rid of mutual friends.”
Social Media Fanboy: “Like Twitter?”
Dopplr-tard: “Twitter is so hot right now.”
Social Media Fanboy: “But my location should be private unless I share it with someone else!”
Dopplr-tard: “Well, how about the opposite? I choose to share trips with you! Then you can see anything I send you and we don’t need to be mutual friends.”
Social Media Fanboy: “Brilliant! But what if I don’t want to see someone’s trips?”
Dopplr-tard: “Then you can just ‘mute’ them.”
ON A ONE-BY-ONE BASIS.
Useless and a complete waste of any Cute Girl’s time. I’d quit the service except that their Facebook app is pretty and I have some major carbon guilt.
Update: Matt, I like Dopplr and you can do so much better than this. Please bring back mutual friends and friend requests.
7 Comments
Riccardo
Oh well. I love dopplr but, yeah, you got a point.
Now the good thing, I suppose, is that the whole unrequested display of carbon waste is concentrated in one email.
…and on the journal, uhm… ok I seldom use it…
…and on the location calendar! geez, that thing is on my iCal!
Ok, you got a point. A good one.
Joey
> a complete waste of any Cute Girl’s time
I wonder if anyone has studied large social graphs to determine if level of cuteness is highly correlated with a large in-degree.
Actually, I wonder if it would be just the in-degree or the ratio of in-degree to out-degree.
Paul Mison
Let’s not pretend that mutual friending (like on Twitter) is a panacea. If I grant someone the ability to follow my (private) tweets, then I’m forced to see their updates. There’s nothing I can do to mute them (unlike Dopplr); if they turn out to be one of those people who posts every ten minutes, I can’t get rid of them without blocking them from reading my stuff.
Anyway, the Dopplr muting them one-by-one process isn’t that hard- the manage connections page lets you see everyone in one go.
(Funnily enough I reckon it’s easier than managing notifications on - you guessed it - Twitter, which involves opening each user and then faffing with a pop-open box. I’d do something to fix it via the API, except there isn’t a way of getting the current notification state.)
As to Riccardo, I have no idea what he’s on; carbon calculation is opt-in and I don’t see it anywhere except the carbon tab. On the other hand, I have configured Dopplr never to email me.
Matt
Hi Leah
We never had the equivalent ‘mutual friending’- we’ve always tried to be really clear that we’re not social network for cataloging friendships, but a social tool for sharing information with people you trust.
Hence the language deliberately avoiding ‘friends’ and talking about ‘sharing trips’ i.e. the informational relationship you establish with people.
While we thought in our gut that this was right when we started, it’s clear that ‘the tyranny of the idiom’ again is winning out in people’s brains, so we’re working on how we can map concepts we think are important (privacy, politeness, strong bonds and contexts for trust, avoidance of information/attention overload) to the mental maps most people have of the general territory we’re in re: social tools.
As a result we’re going to stick with the asymmetrical approach for now, but we will be improving some things to help with the management of this soon.
Hope that helps, and hope you continue to like using Dopplr.
p.s. I’m probably not the matt (biddulph) you’re refering to… but hey!
Ted Dziuba
Leah, you aren’t cut out for this kind of writing.
Do you have any python code you can post instead? How about a routine to compute the Fibonacci sequence? I hear those are popular nowadays.
Leah
Matt - Mutual relationships make much more sense for Dopplr - I don’t really care if you want to store them or not. Why not just use Facebook auth and social graph?
The point is that one-way relationships for exchanging private data is ridiculous. I don’t want people to be able to PUSH information to me.
Leah
Ted - you’re probably right. I’m not good at being an asshole.
I thought about writing a review of Persai, but 1) I’ve never tried it and 2) it’s written in Java so code FAIL QED.