“Edopter is social trendcasting, combining user insight and worldwide buzz to tap into the next big thing. Users create and follow trends, share and discuss them – then watch as they spread across the world. The site provides a social interaction point around trends in people, places, things, ideas, fashion, media and the web. Part wiki, part stock market game, users get in on trends with potential and earn points as they gain popularity both online and off”
Social trendcasting website Edopter is attempting to do something no other website has successfully acheived – predicting upcoming trends. The model is fairly simple. Edopter allows users to create “trends” based on what they believe will eventually catch on. Some current trends are obvious such as ”Batman: Dark Knight” and others not e.g. “Tap Water”. The user that creates the trend is then faced with the task of writing a “pitch” surrounding why they feel the trend will catch on. Edopter’s system then scans the web searching for content around the trend and returns a measurable level “buzz” back to the user. From here, users have the capability to post videos, pictures and discussions surrounding a trend. With more discussion and content comes more users and popularity, thus increasing the value of the trend. Users must “buy into” each trend using points accumulated from various activities on performed on the website. Each user starts with 500 points and the earlier you get into a trend the cheaper the buy-in, hence users are encouraged to spot trends as early possible.
The ultimate goal of Edotopter is to gain access to a specific demographic that has never before been tapped…trendsetters. These are the early adopters that are always on the lookout for new ideas -the big picture people if you will. However, I feel there is one major flaw in this system. From my perspective it seems that most of the trends posted on Edopter are ones that already exist, i.e. “Batman: Dark Knight”. Yes, the movie is tremendously popular and many people are buying into to this trend, but it is in no way anything new. In fact, unless there is pre-existing internet buzz floating around a current topic, Edopter won’t assign a high trend value to the topic following its scan of the web. Personally, I struggle to see how value is created simply from discussion around a movie that has already broken the single weekend box office record or any other topic already being discussed all across the world.
Hopefully as the site progresses (only in the beta stage now), more users will join and create content for their own “big ideas” rather than the current pre-existing trends, however, I personally would be hesitant to post any of my own “big ideas” until I know it’s rock solid and ready for feedback/criticism/praise. That said, I think this is a cool concept and is worth checking out.
Thoughts?
-PB
2 responses so far ↓
Andy // July 22, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Hey Paul, thanks for checking out edopter! I’m Andy, one of the cofounders of the site. I definitely appreciate the thoughts on the site so far. Like you mentioned, we’re pretty early stage, but the community has been extremely active and vocal so far.
It’s true that some of the trends launched so far could be seen as “mainstream”, we expected that for the beginning. Everyone has a different idea of what trends are, and some are later in the game when it come to identifying the next big thing. The awesome thing about edopter is that it’s a completely open platform. We allow users to both discover new stuff that interests you and share your insight on current trends. The site is constantly evolving, and we’re finishing up some features that will draw more attention to the cutting edge trends and highlight the people behind them. We’re also constantly working on the algorithm behind the scenes to tweak the affects of outside buzz on trends across the site.
If you guys have any thoughts on ways we could improve or suggestions for the future, I’d love to hear them. Email me at hello@edopter.com
Thanks again for checking us out!
Paul Boulus // July 23, 2008 at 7:37 am
Andy,
Thanks for the great feedback. I completely agree with you that what makes Edopter is the open platform type environment. I think it will be very interesting to see how the conversation across this platform changes as the site continues to progress. As we both mentioned, some of the “trends” are definitely more mainstream today, however, I think I will see those trends evolve into more unique concepts with the growing user base.
That said, the hardest part of this equation will be getting the users to join before these new and progressive trends are established within the website. It’s the whole chicken and the egg story. What is the incentive for users to join before there is an established base of trendcasters, and, how do you get these trendcasters to join in the first place? I think it’s a great way for people to discover new interests/happenings that they were completely unaware of and I really hope it takes off. Best of luck, we’ll continue to check in.
-PB