Dopplr - coding on the shoulders of giants
This is a great presentation I picked up yesterday, from the team at Dopplr. It’s somewhat technical, and useful for developers for that reason, but it’s making some important points about business trends as well.
The first big point is that you don’t have to build a huge online service to do something truly useful. Dopplr actually does a very simple thing, but it does it in an open way that makes it easy to integrate with other things. The presentation gives lots of examples of this: blog badges, Facebook integration and even a tool that can tell you how much CO2 you’re producing with your business travel, all powered by trip data at Dopplr, but integrated with other things, to make 1+1=3.
The second big point is about identity management. OpenID is emerging as a standard for identification online: Dopplr, 37 Signals (with their Basecamp application) and many, many others are turning to OpenID to manage authentication and identification. This will make it much easier for applications to stitch together bits of information from different sources. But there are also standard APIs (Google has one, Facebook has one, Flickr has one) that make it easy for users of the Internet to authorise applications to access the data from each others’ systems on behalf of the user. OpenID will be a big part of lots of services looking forward.
[…] something about this that reminds me of yesterday’s piece about Dopplr: building something very functional and making it easy to plug into (and well-documented) makes it […]