An Internet peculiarity

Today I noticed on Twitter that a friend had signed up to Dabble.in. Here's the tweet:

I just reserved my Dabble.in username. Gets yours here -

The link lead to http://dabble.in/

The website proffers a tagline ("What do you Dabble?"—capital D because, you know, it's a brand), and a form that invites you to reserve your dabble.in username. A message at the top of the screen reads:

That's it.

This site exemplifies an Internet peculiarity that I wanted to discuss with you. No, it's not the use of brands as an excuse to misappropriate grammar. It is: new services inviting you to hand over your personal details without even doing you the courtesy of telling you what it is you're signing up for.

This approach seems peculiar to the Web. I've never seen anyone succeed with it—or expect to—offline.

Okay, okay, okay. Let's be reasonable. "Dabble", according to the Oxford, means "to take part in an activity in a casual or superficial way." The little video that materialised when I pressed P on my keyboard had no words, but a lot of pictures of people doing stuff—skateboarding, cutting hair, making cheese, drawing cars.

Also, the vast majority of the people in the video seemed to be men. A small point, perhaps, but when that's literally all I have to use to form some comprehension of what I'm signing up for, an overrepresentation of one group of potential users does actually matter.

From all this we might conclude that Dabble will be a site that somehow allows you to opine about, or somehow share your experiences of, a hobby or interest that you have. Although that guy looked like he was cutting hair professionally. Whatever.

The real question here is not, "Was he a professional barber?" but, "Really, seriously, guys, what the fuck does this site do?" Dabble spent all this time putting together a neat little video and licensing some nifty music to dub over the shots they must have sourced from some kind of footage library, and they still couldn't manage to tell me what my affiliation with Dabble will mean? Really?

No benefits? No features? No usecase? No nothing?

The username I'll get if I sign up in the next 30 seconds looks a lot like my Twitter URL (dabble.in/username) so (thinks a person who has prior experience with such services—others are simply bewildered) perhaps it's like a social network for people with personal and professional interests. But that sounds a lot like Twitter to me. There must be some difference. Am I even on the right track here? Maybe it's nothing like Twitter. Maybe it's something else altogether!

Who knows?

In the offline world, you could never market like this. Imagine some dude rocks up to your door with a subscription form for Dabble, and no information about it. What do you do? Slam the door in his face, of course. Just because I've accessed Dabble.in through a link my friend tweeted (or had tweeted on his behalf—who knows?) shouldn't mean I'll suck it down like manna from heaven. Personal referral means zilch if I have no idea what I'm signing up to. Right?

Wrong. Dabble.in probably has bazillions of subscribers already. Why? We don't know what it is, people. We don't know! For a moment I thought perhaps they'd implemented an enormous, world-beating media campaign, and were being written about everywhere, but Google, who also market their services on this no-information-rely-on-brand-only basis, has no results for Dabble other than the cutesy homepage.

Why is it that web users will sign up for services without any idea of even a benefit? Why is it that online marketers don't perceive that they could potentially broaden their audience if they identified the service benefit, or bothered actually addressing the people they are supposedly marketing to? Wouldn't it be better if they did?

Have we reached a point where less actual information implies a big and reliable brand, and is all (along with a "personal referral" auto-tweet) that's needed for me to feel compelled to sign up?

Call me a late adopter if you will, but between security and privacy hoo ha, the seven million username-and-password combinations I already own and have forgotten, and an interest in filtering the crap—even the crap my friends tweet—I think a little more information wouldn't go astray. I think I'll need it before I "Reserve [my] spot".