For those that haven’t heard of Dopplr it’s a travel tool that allows you to share plans with your network of friends and colleagues. Rather like in work when you let people know where you’re going to be, Dopplr lets you share this information with the people you choose, not just as a way of keeping people informed but also as a means to organise your time better. If you happen to be in New York on business when your friend or business associate is too than why not meet up for dinner or arrange a quick meeting rather than kill down time on your own for example.

Askpeopleyouknow (AKYP) is a social search tool that lets you share searches with your chosen network. It’s a social network in that you need to create a profile and then invite or find friends. Once you’ve done this the idea is that can not only search the web as you would normally but also ask your network of friends if they have any ideas as well. It’s been funded by Peter Bazalgette, ex Creative Director of Endemol, amongst others so it will be interesting to see how quickly it can gain traction in an already extremely competitive search market. Getting people to give up the Google search habit is no easy task as Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask have all found out.

With regards to us, it’s great news to see value being put on both these products as they offer features and benefits that we’ve built into Cofacio.

The first is the ability to share information with other people which benefits us by allowing us to find others in similar situations so we can jointly make the most of our time and be better organised. Finding others looking for the same can open up numerous opportunities for cooperation between those two or more people as they share a common objective.

The second is the ability to ask a number of people easily and simply, without having to do so individually by phone, mail or in person. In the case of Cofacio you can ask other Cofacio users or post your query to your contacts on Facebook or Twitter. So while search engines undoubtedly provide us fantastic access to the information documented on the web, it’s worth remembering that;

1. People are great sources of tacit knowledge, i.e. information that can’t easily be transferred in writing and is better explained via conversation
2. A lot of information simply isn’t on the web and resides in people. I’m still looking for a statistic but my guess is that a minuscule percentage of the worlds information is documented, let alone made public online. Just consider the number of closed company and organisational intranets.
3. It is often other people’s opinions that help us make decisions. People we know or those we consider experts allow us to qualify information that we find and benefit from their experience and knowledge.

To end then, congratulations to Dopplr and good luck to Askpeopleyouknow. It’s always good to hear positive news about other web companies in the cooperation space and great to see such an ambitious start up as AKYP being run out of the UK.