“Social trendcasting”, a phrase that will almost guarantee you win that round of buzzword bingo. Edopter seems to be trying hard to capture the wisdom of crowds when it comes to trends, in a manner that basically reminds me of Hot or Not meets Likaholix.
The premise appears to be that users can sign up and then vote whether a trend is ‘in’ or ‘out’, submit their own trends, comment on trends and ‘pitch’ them (which is just a glorified soapbox style comment). You then have access to this user data by seeing whether a trend has high momentum, seeing which demographic group it’s most popular with, and looking at how much buzz it’s generated.
First thoughts: It’s trying too hard to do too much with too few. I can’t really get a handle on the user base size, but it just doesn’t seem a tremendously busy site in terms of crowd voting. There’s some great features that encourage user stickiness, such as levels and tokens (upon logging in for the first time I am called a ‘newb’, which says a lot about the user demographic). Forcing people to enter birthday and location when they sign up is instant demographic data win. But I don’t really have a clue whether something being ‘in’ on Edopter means it’s ‘in’ everywhere, or whether there’s just a specific demographic using the site in the first place.
The bits that intrigue me most are the access to historical data, the fact users can submit their own trends and thus potentially give brands and new ideas a safe sounding area, and the internet buzz tracking. Which, sad to say, appears pretty primitive (mention counting), but at least it’s a start. I guess my gut feeling is they could do a lot more with the ‘crowdsourcing’ of the internet’s voice, rather than a locked-in userbase — but looking at the potential business models, I suppose the userbase is their platform, monetising early adopters rather than the underlying technology. Plus, if they went off and did crowdsourced opinion aggregation they’d be a competitor, so I should probably shut up right about now.
2 Comments
Hi Jennie,
I am one of the co-founders of edopter. Thanks (err.. I think) for writing about edopter. The version of edopter your playing with is a preview of our new version. The full site should launch in the next few weeks (we wanted to show off some new stuff at SXSW.)
Social trendcasting is the idea that we can combine user generated content and buzz we collect from around the web. edopter itself is meant to be fun for our users like a game, but we are working on additional ‘pro’ tools which will launch in the future. But ultimately our goal was to have a human aspect, that we could create a feedback loop with.
That being said, if your at SXSW we would love to sit down and chat. If not email me sometime. I would love to hear more about what your working on.
March 16, 2009 @ 12:47 am
Afraid I’m not at SXSW this year, but thanks for noticing the post ;) I’m looking forward to what you’ll be doing with edopter, I definitely got the ‘game’ aspect of it (though I’m still not sure you should call brand new members ‘noobs’). It’s interesting to see different approaches to what’s ultimately the same question, “is this brand hot?”, so I’ll have another look when the full site’s launched!
March 16, 2009 @ 3:43 pm