Pairup and Dopplr: Ships-Passing-In-The-Night

A few months ago I took a look at Pairup, wishing for the perfect ‘ships-passing-in-the-night’ app. (I wonder if Matt Biddulph read that, and started work on Dopplr?)

[from /Message: Pairup]

There is more to Pairup than finding old friends: the service is geared to helping business travelers meet new people as well, such as people attending the same event you are traveling to, or locals with similar interests. I wonder if by trying to do so much, however, the designers have moved too far away from a simple premise, and move into conflict with larger professional social networks? On the other hand, I could make the argument that my “ships in the night” service is really just a feature than a solution like Upcoming.org or Google Calendar could offer.

I am not really in the market to meet new people who happen to be traveling to the same city as me, a capability that Pairup seems geared toward. There is some coolness in trying to learn something about people that are attending a conference with me, but sites like the vastly interesting Reboot.dk website demonstrate what a socially architected conference website can aspire to. So I think that Pairup is smooshing a bunch of features together that are unnatural, which Dopplr — although missing some fine-grained controls that I want, such as the time of day when someone will actually arrive and depart a specific city — focuses on just doing one thing right. This is another case of too many features detracting from a clear focus, I think, so I favor Dopplr over Pairup.