Dopplr

» see dopplr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

dopplr sat in the part of the early-web-2.0 social stack that i could read about but never had a reason to sign up for. it was a tool for people whose work involved being in a different city next month, and in 2008 those people were mostly london, san francisco, and berlin tech-press. i was in ankara watching the same tech-press from a feed reader.

the product was simple. you typed in your upcoming trips and dopplr crossed them against your contacts' trips. if you and a friend were both going to be in barcelona during the same week, the site told you. there was a carbon-footprint calculator too, which felt very 2008. the design was clean, the founders were respected (marko ahtisaari later ran nokia design, matt biddulph and matt jones were already known in the london scene), and the user base topped out around 39,000 monthly uniques.

nokia bought it on 28 september 2009. that part is well documented. what is also well documented is that the dopplr blog stopped updating two days after the acquisition. the service went into maintenance mode in september 2010. it limped on as an empty room until nokia posted a goodbye notice in october 2013, gave users a window to export their data, and pulled the plug on 1 november 2013.

~ the case file ~

~ what nokia was actually buying ~

the nokia of 2009 was on a buying spree of small location-savvy startups (plazes the year before, ovi services around the same time, navteq earlier). the official line was that dopplr would feed into nokia's location-services portfolio. the unofficial outcome was that the acquired teams were folded into ovi, the ovi brand was killed two years later, and the original products were left in the maintenance-mode parking lot while nokia fought a losing war against the iphone.

~ the long quiet ~

for the last three years of its life dopplr was technically online and technically functional and emotionally already gone. people who had imported their flights in 2009 could log in and look at them in 2012. nobody was building features. the export tool, when it finally arrived in october 2013, was the only piece of new code the service had seen in years.

~ what carried over ~

the conference-itinerary-social-graph idea did not die with dopplr. it just migrated. tripit absorbed the practical "where will you be" coordination market for business travelers. instagram and twitter swallowed the casual "i am in lisbon" announcement. the part dopplr was actually good at, comparing planned trips before they happened, was small enough that no one rebuilt it. it was a useful tool for about four thousand people, and four thousand people is not a market, it is a mailing list with a database behind it.

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