spreading jam

With the launch of Domo to the app market for the iPhone and Android, the age old question has once again reared its head… how much is too much?

For those of you who haven’t yet had a chance to play with the app for yourself, it connects you to those with similar interests in close proximity, using your location data. Pretty daunting stuff to me, but am I alone?

We live in an age where content creation is the norm, whether that’s on a blog, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube or Facebook to name but a few. The “web generation” are used to being heard, sharing their views and often inner most thoughts (punctuated with updates about lunch, of course) with friends but also, increasingly, strangers.

Up until now, users have been granted a level of privacy in their networks. On Twitter for example, you can choose to keep your profile locked and direct messages are only sent to those whom you decide to follow. Facebook allows you complete control over the privacy of your whole profile, allowing different access for each element of your profile and for different friends.

Domo, however, seems to work on the opposite scale. The app gathers information from your public profile in Facebook. Therefore, for it to have any relevance and to increase your likelihood of finding people that you connect with, you’re required to make more of your data public in Facebook, less than ideal. From my short play with Domo, it appeared there were very few people with the same interests as me, and no, I didn’t list Robot Racing as one of them. The truth is that people’s interests are so varied that it’s going to take great mass adoption before the app would have any true relevance.

It’s probably worth noting that whilst you know what you’re getting yourself into by downloading the app in the first place, it’s not long before you’re bombarded with messages from random strangers and find yourself looking over your shoulder to see if you recognize them. I can’t help but feel that if Domo had a camera facility, we’d soon have a mobile version of Chat Roulette on our hands!

For now, I think I’m OK with engaging on my terms. Whether that remains the same for other interweb users, remains to be seen…