There’s been a lot of attention given to Dopplr recently. It’s an “online service for frequent travellers”, rather pretentiously created by an “international team of world travellers” to help them meet up when they found themselves in the same city: if you see that someone you know is going to be in the same place as you, you can drop them an email or call them and make whatever arrangements you like . It’s wonderful: refreshing, useful, functional, and remarkable largely for what it isn’t, rather than what it is. My relationship with other people is clear, managing my trips is intuitive, and the whole experience is calming in exactly the way that rushing around an airport trying to find an adapator and get through security isn’t.

So why is it different? And what can designers of educational software learn from it?

Amy Jo Kim has talked about the way social networks invite a game-like approach from their users. Anyone who’s spent time amassing “friends” on Facebook or trying to move up the “interesting” rankings on Flickr knows that many social networks turn into more than their primary purpose as soon as enough people join. But for this to happen, users need to have a history, and Dopplr doesn’t give you that: it’s transmitting a stream of information from a traveller’s personal future, not trying to help you win the game.

This also means that there aren’t any ways to contact fellow users on the site – if you know someone well enough to want to hang out with them, you probably have their mobile or email. Matt Jones, one of the creators of the tool, calls it “a feature of a wider system, called the internet“, and this attitude permeates Dopplr. Compare this with the pokes and nudges of Facebook and Twitter, the private messages of every forum or social network, and suddenly they seem greedy, wanting all your online life to take place within their walls.

So what can designers of educational software learn from Dopplr? Simply that tools exist within a wider system: that it is better to create something to do a single job well than it is to build something which does many things badly. Creating a small piece that can be loosely joined with others is truer to the spirit of the internet than building the monolithic “virtual learning environments” and closed communities that currently fill our schools and universities. That’s the true Dopplr shift: away from tools that deny their users’ previous online existence, and towards tools that fit into the way people actually live.

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