Often times there are services which have no real utilitarian purpose, but for some reason, they catch the fancy of people. And go on to become a rage. Perfect examples would be Twitter and Orkut scraps. They dont really serve any significant purpose, but people find them hugely addictive.
Funpiper is a service that falls into this category. Along the same lines as Twitter, Funpiper urges users to answer one simple question – “How was your weekend ?”.
Once you sign up, you ready to start answering how you spent your weekend. Activities fall into pre-determined categories – example: books, concert, movies, cooking, family activities, driving etc..You can comment on posts by other users and also rate and add them to social bookmarking services – although I dont see why one would want to do that.
Social networking features are in the works, so that you’ll soon be able to keep tabs on how your friends spent their weekends. This feature ‘My Friends’ will be released this week and will be a very good enhancement to the existing feature-set. You can also set privacy controls so that only your friends will see your posts.
The one feature I found missing on the site is the ability to tag posts. A Tag cloud would be a very interesting visualization of what are some of the popular weekend activities. Syndication using RSS feeds is another feature that’s missing from the site. A ‘Most Recent’ module would also be a ‘nice to have’ feature.
The site has been started by Ajitesh, an IIT Kharagpur graduate, who is working on Funpiper full time. So far, he’s definitely done a pretty good job at handling the design and implementation, considering that he’s a one man army. The site launched couple of weeks back and has a few hundred registered users already.
As I mentioned earlier, Funpiper may not serve any utilitarian purpose, but I definitely see the possibility that it may go viral and become quite popular.
