Social Network Subscription At Dopplr

Marko Ahtisaari at Dooplr pinged me this morning, and asked me to look at something they are calling Social Network Subscription. Instead of a one time import of your contacts from other services, Dopplr can now subscribe to other services, polling them on a regular basis for contacts who have joined Dopplr.

[from Keep your network up to date using Facebook, Flickr or GMail by Matt Biddulph]

We’ve just introduced something very simple that we call Social Network Subscription. Simply select the networks you’d like to check for people you already know, and Dopplr will scan them once a week and offer you a list in your regular alert email.

Back in March, Drew McLellan wrote an article titled Don’t Import, Subscribe in which he asked why sites like Dopplr and Flickr allowed you to find your friends on other sites, but didn’t automate the process for you. An import is useful, but why couldn’t one site subscribe to the social network of another?

The problem with checking your social data on another website used to be that it required you to give us your password (this is known as the Password Anti-Pattern). Luckily, these days most sites support some form of OAuth, which lets us access your data elsewhere without you ever giving away your password.

With this in place, it’s not a big step to go from a one-off import to a regular subscription.

Another way to think of this: it’s just another manifestation of moving to a web of flow, instead of a web of pages. Why not consider the ‘list’ of contacts at a service (the static, transactional way of looking at it) as a ‘stream’ (the fluid, interactional way of looking at it).

Just as the stream of updates in Twitter, or Dopplr, or Brightkite flow to us, the applications can interact in similar fashion. In this way, the applications start to act more like actors in the world of flow and less like transactional tools in a web of pages.