Meet Mozi

I had never heard of Mozi until a friend mentioned it in a Slack channel earlier today. I didn't hear about their big launch, but it's helmed by Ev Williams of former Blogger, Twitter, and Medium fame and I think it's a legitimately good idea and from my own brief use, I can already tell it is implemented thoughtfully well.

Remember Dopplr?

In the late 2000s, there was a travel-related site called Dopplr started by a couple of brilliant folks in the UK. It was kind of fun, you'd plan out all your upcoming trips in the app and then your mutual contacts could see your trips and hit you up about them. Or you could chat up your friends and ask them about a trip they recently finished, if you were thinking of visiting that city someday.

Searching my archives I can find emails from a random week like this one:

It lets me know two friends were heading into my town and I should reach out, and what some other people are up to and where they'd been. Pretty handy!

The best thing about Dopplr was the end-of-year wrapups. I unfortunately don't have any downloaded PDF reports of my own since all my emails direct to links on a non-existent server, but here's what the annual email looked like:

The best part of the annual report was how it put into context how much pollution your air travel caused in the world. I distinctly remember the number of Hummer H2 trucks you spewed when you added up all your air miles, and how this demo slide of Barack Obama's first year in office burned up as much CO2 as four hummers driving for a year straight.

update: Here's the demo file of Obama's travels that you can zoom in on to see the details.

Honestly, it was a nice way to balance the first impression that Dopplr could be just an app for rich assholes who flew all over without a care in the world. Dopplr had a viewpoint and an opinion. Flying sucks for the environment, and we should do something about that, but also can we make travel a little more fun and magical for the people doing it?

Anyways, it was a nice service and kept me in touch with lots of people for years and years. I would frequently "host" incoming acquaintances and it let me get tips from friends in towns I was headed to. Eventually it got sold to Nokia and then some other company and then some other company and I think it all went offline around 2017.

Oh well, that's how the early Web 2.0 world went.

Remember Foursquare?

Honestly I disliked Foursquare from day one. You mindlessly check into every single place you go and I had lots of online friends that used it too and some of them were crazy with it and would put their apartments in it and track 14 locations of where they went every day and honestly, it was too much data and not interesting enough until there were several years of datapoints to draw from after the early nerds laid all the groundwork.

Then they started doing city guides. And I could read reviews. And when I was in an airport, I could find out if any friends flew through it today or even friends-of-friends. And the restaurant reviews were great, not the normal crap you'd read on Tripadvisor where people seem humorless and void of any curiosity about the world, but other hip nerds who seek out the best ramen or coffee or whatever sharing their honest opinions. The data about every city was worth its weight in gold after a few years.

The most magical moment of Foursquare (and later Swarm, ugh) use for me was when a longtime online friend I hadn't talked to in a several years was suddenly a couple miles from my home in Oregon. He lives in Missouri so this made no sense, so I immediately texted him to make sure the app notification wasn't a fluke and boom, he really was a couple miles away so I drove down and we hung out and that was the true power of serendipity that made all the years of mindless checkins worth something.

Enter Mozi

It's 2024. It seems like every social network is either public to the entire world, like X or Threads (filled with thousands of randos, all ready to yell at you for being "wrong") or completely private to your closest friends, like Apple's Find My app.

That leaves a huge gap. Why are all social networks structured around being either loosely public to the entire world, or only a coven of your blood oath relatives?

Mozi looks on the surface to be basically an updated copy of Dopplr for now. You enter trips you're planning to take and it dutifully alerted me that a friend is currently in Chicago, and if I was going to be overlapping with him, I would definitely reach out and try and meet up.

Looking through my contacts on the app, I see friends flying all over the country to various events over the next year. That reminds me I should text one of them some tips about Louisville since I just got back from there. Another good thing Dopplr did well.

In its current form, it's nice to share semi-privately with an extended group of friends (friends being defined as people with my phone number).

If I was going to NYC tomorrow, I'd probably text three friends there, hear back that two of them are out of town and one of them is busy with family stuff. I wouldn't think to alert the other dozen people I loosely know in NYC but haven't seen in years, but if they could casually see I was headed to NYC and reached out? That'd be pretty great. There's nothing out there that fills that niche.

One of the great things about the internet is getting to learn from lots of different people and hear their perspectives and in that classic internet sense, it was always fun to "know" someone online for years (possibly decades) before you finally meet them in person and it's always fun how you immediately gel with them because you already have a rapport.

Anyways, Mozi looks to maximize all those good serendipitous moments.

Trusting texting over in-app messaging

I'm impressed the app has a little contact/comment icon to reach out to friends and instead of having another inbox of unread messages at Mozi, it just launches into Messages on your phone so you can text your friends outside the app.

That's a good sign that the crew behind Mozi trusts users to connect with each other how they always have, and it doesn't get in the way or create another inbox you need to check.

It also makes me optimistic about the end game for Mozi—let's say ten years from now—if someday it's a rotting hulk of what it once was.

Looking at my Dopplr emails, I can't follow any links to my data or my profile because it's just URLs and the servers are long gone, my data that gave me interesting insights was vaporized over half a decade ago.

If I use Mozi for a couple years and get some fun use out of it, and then suddenly it gets weird and becomes a AI scrapping geo-located ad service instead, I can stop using it and delete my account and still have all my friends in my contacts that I can text normally. Sure, the cool location-based serendipity connections will be gone, but I won't really lose any data in the process.

I like that and trust them more, since they trust me to operate outside their walls using the familiar paths I'm used to.

Serendipitous meetups

I keep repeating the word "serendipity" but it really is one of the most magical aspects of the classic internet. You read blogs and newsletters and back in the day, we'd all talk together on AIM for years and you'd develop hundreds of parasocial relationships with random strangers whose writing you admire, and then one day they're randomly at the same conference or city you're at and you get to meet them and it was almost always an amazing experience.

Some of my best memories are when I realized a friend was also at Disneyland, on the other side of the park on the same day as me and we could hang out together, which we did. Or the times I indicated I was off to NYC in a couple months and a few people I hadn't caught up with in years saw it and reached out and we got food together.

Apple really sucks at this, don't they?

Honestly, for the 100th time, if Apple wasn't so bad at all forms of social software, they could have crushed this category a dozen years ago by extending what Find My Friends could do.

The way that app works today, you practically have to have a blood oath with your small group of friends because it sends your 24/7 realtime location to everyone for an hour, for a day, or forever. Those are the only choices.

Find My, but it only shows my location when I'm not at home outside my own geofence? Honestly an easy upgrade to the service that would make people more comfortable with it. Find My, but maybe my mutual followers on a social network can sometimes see when I feel like sharing while I'm on a special trip? Find My, but it also shows me where my friends are planning to go so I can touch base with them before? All obvious things.

Apple could have done so many things like this with their core suite of apps, stuff like Maps and Photos that dozens of other companies sprang up to fill those gaps, and it looks like Mozi is just another good idea done by someone else that isn't Apple.

I hope this one works out

It's kind of weird it's only about upcoming travel currently, as I think a service like this could expand in all sorts of ways, just currently it seems like a jetsetter lifestyle app. But I really want to believe that I'll run into friends randomly in the future who use it, and I would love it if every old school blogger that I've read for over 20 years would sign up and we could see where we cross paths someday. So I'm going to use the heck out of it until it either starts paying dividends with unexpected meetups or the service sours on how I wished to use it.

I have a good feeling this could turn into a really cool early web kind of app, it seems to have a bunch of good ideas and interesting approaches and a thoughtful team behind it building new features.