The time of New Year’s resolutions is upon us. Come January 1, millions of Americans will vow to shrink their waistlines, and my gym will become a haven for the masses of fair-weather gym-goers. Spin classes will start filling up several minutes before start, crowded locker rooms will ensure the intrusion of personal space bubbles, and I will have to start fighting with passion and fury for my elliptical.
Not that I’m bitter or anything.
My personal feelings towards New Year’s resolutions aside, a personal goals startup called Dorthy.com just relaunched its site with an interesting concept that could prove useful to 2010 goal-setters. The site allows you to create “dreampages” for each of your goals, whether it’s “to lose weight” (Dorthy’s recent New Year’s resolution study reported that 63% of respondents were vowing to shred pounds in 2010) or “Sail around the world.” The dreampage serves as a central location for the planning, sharing and tracking of the goal.
Dorthy (which I forever want to keep spelling as Dorothy – perhaps I watched the Wizard of Oz one time many times as a child) certainly isn’t the first goal-setting website in existence. However, its primary differentiator is that in addition to providing a place where users can articulate their goals and discuss them with like-minded users, it also provides frequently updated content from search engines around that topic – articles, blog entries, videos, etc. Dorthy claims that 50% of searches on the web are repeated by the same people day-after-day, and they can eliminate the need to keep re-Googling by providing a central location where users can return to find new resources regarding their goal.
Let’s briefly put aside the fact that it’s significantly easier to type a search in my browser toolbar than to go to Dorthy’s site, log in, and navigate to the dreampage in question. Let’s also dismiss that the website is rather clunky in its current alpha version, and that the content on my dreampage for “find a pair of skinny jeans” (screenshot below) wasn’t altogether relevant to my goal (note the video about a guy who puts on a cursed pair of ugly jeans that turn him into a mega-sketchy guy).
What I found most interesting is that Dorthy relies on three fundamental assumptions
about search and human behavior:
1) Goals are fundamentally social. This
one comes as no particular surprise – it doesn’t take a psychology degree to
understand that talking about one’s goals makes one more likely to achieve them
by adding a layer of accountability. Additionally, there’s a classic “gym buddy”
concept – when others share in your goal, supporting and motivating each other,
the goal becomes easier to accomplish. Dorthy simply takes this community
aspect of goals and gives it a home on the web (which, granted, 43 Things and
others have been doing for years).
2) Goals are linked to search. It makes sense the search engines service as a primary starting ground for researching and achieving goals. If I decided I were to run a marathon, I would start by researching training schedules and other aspects on Google. If my goal was to visit Peru, I would also begin my search for travel information, flights and activities on search engines. But the question is – how far in the goal process does this relationship last? Once I’ve already determined my training timeline and found the perfect running gear and my goal race, I’m less likely to be constantly searching for new marathon information
3) Search behavior can be changed. Ahha, the concept that the good people of Microsoft bet their piggy bank on (a fraction of it, at least). Dorthy relies on the concept that it’s possible to retrain people to stop searching for things on Google and instead log into their website for updated content. Never say never, of course, but this one seems the most far-fetched. The problem is that Google is just too darn easy, and search behavior is too deeply ingrained. Breaking habits is always the marketer’s greatest challenge – not an impossible one, but nothing to sneeze at.
Regardless of whether Dorthy.com succeeds are not, it serves as another example of the growing connectivity of the internet. Search and social are being more greatly intertwined – there are countless examples of this, from sharing resources on Facebook to real-time Twitter results on Google’s search results page. Whatever developments come next, 2010 is almost certain to be a fascinating year.
It’s a great time to be in the digital world, folks.
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