dad, dopplr and metadata

From July 3rd

Whenever my Dad fills his car with petrol he notes down the mileage so he can monitor its performance. He's an engineer, it's just what he does. But many of us have similar tendencies and collecting data is like collecting anything else, once you amass a certain amount you're reluctant to give it up. If you stopped you'd be 'wasting metadata'. I've always thought businesses and brands should be helping us with these tendencies, they should be doing interesting things with what they know about us, and perfect examples of this have just been launched by the travel and community site dopplr.com. We could all learn from their approach. Dopplr lets you share your travel plans with friends and colleagues, it highlights coincides, telling you when people you know are going to be in the same place as you. This is a good and useful thing, but perhaps not that exciting. What it then does that's clever is take the information it's captured and make it into other things you might find useful.

For instance; since the site knows where you've been it can create a permanent archive of your trips, and if you want, can integrate this with a photosharing sight like flickr. It's the perfect aid to filling in an expense report. Look at a trip on dopplr and it'll tell you where you were, who else was there, and show you the pictures you took at the time. But the thing I really like is the way they're starting to be playful through a set of what they call 'data toys'. My favourite's called 'personal velocity'. Because you've entered your trips around the world dopplr can calculate a figure that represents your average speed across the planet. It's obviously a notional, abstract figure, but that doesn't make it any less intriguing. They let you share this figure in your public profile, and take the playfulness a step further by telling you what animal moves at a similar speed. I'm a butterfly, the fastest friend I have is a squirrel. And people who don't travel much at all are told that they're glaciers, or akin to the crawler NASA use to transport space shuttles.

This is all, of course, pointless and silly. But it's also charming, engaging and relatively easy to do. It's the kind of thing that encourages you to share your data, to open up and be more social (Assuming that, as dopplr are, you're very careful about permissions and privacy.) Most of the businesses that collect data from us seem to use it only to their advantage, to profile us, target us, up-sell or blacklist us, if more businesses used it to play games with us we might, collectively, waste less metadata.