Could one redo any useful app, for that matter, that now fills the start-up cemetery?
I was reminded of this as Peter mentioned Dopplr, a useful and beautifully designed service in the years 2007-2010. The Dopplr service died because it was acquired by Nokia and left to rot. Its demise had nothing to do with the use value of the service, but everything with it being a VC funded start-up that exited to a big corporation in an identity crisis which proved unequipped to do something useful with it.
Some years ago I kept track of hundreds of examples of open data re-use in applications, websites and services. These included many that at some point stopped to exist. I had them categorised by the various phases of when they stalled. This because it was not just of interest which examples were brought to market, but also to keep track of the ideas that materialised in the many hackathons, yet never turned into an app or service, Things that stalled during any stage between idea and market. An idea that came up in France but found no traction, might however prove to be the right idea for someone in Lithuania a year later. An app that failed to get to market because it had a one-sided tech oriented team, might have succeeded with another team, meaning the original idea and application still had intrinsic use value.
Similarly Dopplr did not cease to exist because its intrinsic value as a service was lost, but because everything around it was hollowed out. Hollowed out on purpose, as a consequence of its funding model.
I bet many of such now-lost valuable services could lead a healthy live if not tied to the ‘exit-or-bust’ cycle. If they can be big enough in the words of Lee Lefever, if they can be a Zebra, not aiming to become a unicorn.
So, what are the actual impediments to bring a service like Dopplr back. IP? If you would try to replicate it, perhaps yes, or if you use technology that was originally created for the service you’re emulating. But not the ideas, which aren’t protected. In the case of Dopplr it seems there may have been an attempt at resurrection in 2018 (but it looked like a copy, not a redo of the underlying idea).
Of course you would have to rethink such a service-redo for a changed world, with new realities concerning platforms and commonly used hardware. But are there actual barriers preventing you to repeat something or create variations?
Or is it that we silently assume that if a single thing has failed at some point, there’s no point in trying something similar in new circumstances? Or that there can ever only be one of something?
Repetitions and Variations, a beautiful Matisse exhibit we saw in 2012 in the Danish national art gallery in Copenhagen. Image by Ton Zijlstra, license CC BY-NC-SA
12 stages, 1 painting. I’m thinking the reverse, 1 sketch, 12 paintings. Image by Ton Zijlstra, license CC BY-NC-SA
Normandy Cliff with fish, times 3. Matisse ‘Repetitions and Variations’ exhibit. Image by Ton Zijlstra, license CC BY-NC-SA
I assume that in its most basic form I could redo Dopplr of sorts by announcing travel plans in an OPML file, much like book lists or my rss subscriptions. Then it comes down to how to share such travel plans with a known and limited network only. (You don’t want to announce to just everyone when you won’t be home.)
The IndieWeb efforts concerning travel seem to focus on posting actual travel movements, like planned flights. A sort-of check-in style post. The socially shared Dopplr info was much simpler: a city and a set of dates. Because its purpose was aiding serendipitous meet-ups. Exact travel plans or exact location aren’t needed for it, just a way to flag paths more or less crossing to those involved.
Of course making such an OPML file currently is as easy as posting an empty file, as there’s no travel currently.
Theoretically I could use such an OPML file to announce several things:
The various cities I consider as home turf, as they’re within easy reach in an hour.
Selected cities I’m willing to travel to at short notice outside that hour travel time if there’s a good reason to.
From where I am a visit to Antwerp, Brussels, Eindhoven would count in that category, or maybe on specific occasions Düsseldorf or Cologne.
Upcoming travel plans, things like ‘Copenhagen, Denmark, 4th-7th September’ (actually a 2019 example)
Such a list would allow comparison with your list to see whether any of your travel plans match with my ‘home turf’ and destinations I’m willing to consider outside of it, whether any of your travel plans match with my travel plans, or whether any of my travel plans line up with your home turf and other relatively nearby destinations you’re willing to consider. Cities and countries are part of schema.org vocabularies and as such usable in OPML as data attributes.
I think there’s a space for location based services, such as Dopplr was, that don’t depend on or use maps, but provide location contextualized information that influences my actions, choices and my relationships to my networks (a quote from a 2012 blogpost on moving beyond the map).
Or this is just me applying my current opml hammer to anything that might be a nail
I couldn’t resist making this mock-up mimicking the colorful Dopplr
My blog tells me it’s 18 years ago today I installed Skype and made my first call with Dina Mehta and Stuart Henshall the same day. That was three weeks after Skype launched in public beta. I don’t remember, nor does my blog for me, when my last Skype call was. Sometime after the 2011 Microsoft acquisition for sure. Maybe when they switched from the original peer to peer to a central server model? More likely it was around the time when they confused the world by having Skype and Skype for Business as completely separate things yet using the same name, from the fall of 2016. I uninstalled it by 2019 I think. My meeting and conversation notes mention ‘skype call’ for the last time somewhere during 2015.
Are there any current p2p voip applications that can capture the fascination that Skype held in 2003? Has it gone ‘under the hood’ as a protocol, living in different silos? Or is there an existing ecosystem of apps and users still around? Is Skype p2p voip a thing that could be useful to recreate?
[UPDATE: I should have thought to look for it in my blog: I did ask the same questions about what the Skype of now would be, a little under a year ago.]
A (short) list of applications that were very useful to me at one time, but then went away or astray. The question is, could one redo these in a current and useful way?
Dopplr: showing simple travel plans (city and dates) to facilitate serendipitous meet-ups outside your regular movements. (went away after being acquired)
Delicious: social bookmarking (went astray by dropping/breaking-by-redoing the social functionality, then went away). Have a project on the shelf to redo this for myself, called Linqurator.
Skype: p2p voip (went astray by dropping p2p in favor of centralised servers, after acquisition by Microsoft). See this and this posting asking questions about the current p2p voip space.
Bookmarked (Re)Introducing Readlists by Jim Nielsen
This is another good example to put on my list of ‘discontinued services that deserve to be re-created’, although not necessarily as a central tool and more like a personal tool that can network. Delicious, Dopplr are others that come to mind. Also relevant because, in terms of reading, pulling together a collection of web articles on the same topic and then reading and annotating them in one go, this might be more effective in terms of learning. Might give this a try with some already saved articles on one topic or other. (found via Frank Meeuwsen)