Leading a Life of Danger

Mike Popovic introduced T-Mobile's photo-snapping Sidekick to the world of Weblogging. This is his story.

I'm not a big gadget person. I never got around to getting a cell phone. When I signed up to beta test the Hiptop handheld device for Danger Research [a.k.a. T-Mobile's Sidekick], I asked the test's coordinators if I could put up a sort of beta testing Weblog, using pictures I took with the device. They thought it was a great idea. Then I thought: Wouldn't it be fun to set up a big communal Weblog where everyone with a Hiptop could post? So I did: Hiptop Nation. I got a big response.

Close to four hundred people have sent in at least one entry. You have high concentrations from New York, San Francisco and the Midwest. Recently there was a big surge in Florida for some reason. Lot of Texans on there. It's pretty spread out.

The pictures are not very high-res. I think what draws people to this is the real-time aspect. You're capturing pictures you might not otherwise because you have this device with you all the time. Instead of saying, “Earlier today I saw this cool car,” you can say, “I'm here right now checking out this car.” It makes a difference.

The pictures are an extension of the same storytelling aspect that motivates people to do blogs. There's a great post on Hiptop Nation where some guy bought a used car and was driving it home cross-country — unregistered and uninsured. He got pulled over and the police towed his car, and he thought to take a picture of it happening and blogged about it. One guy ran the Hawaii marathon and blogged it the whole way. Every couple miles, he'd take a picture and say, “My feet are killing me!” People thought it was really cool. A lot of links from the outside ended up pointing to that.

We had a Halloween photo scavenger hunt in October. We got almost sixty people to sign up. They were really into it. It was a 24-hour event. I came up with a list of three hundred items. Because you're just getting photos of the items and not the actual items, you can come up with some really crazy stuff: a human brain, a package of blood. A lot of people said it was viral marketing because a lot of items required you to take a picture of a person — a fireman, a kid in a certain kind of costume — and you end up exposing them to the device. It did illustrate the kind of viral marketing that could be done. But the idea was just to have fun.

I have a bunch of other game ideas for the future. People definitely want more games. I never imagined that it would get this popular.