oobi is love

[devi]

It's like my experiment, but in the 60s and with cute googly eyes...

muffledsqueak pointed me at the Oobi site. Oobi was a little plastic egg-shape with cartoon eyes. You put a message inside it, addressed it and left it somewhere, and the idea was that it would get carried a little way by one passer-by, then another and another, till it arrived at its destination. That was the idea. In practice, people hated it. That's actually the word they use, hated. The few that were sent vanished without trace.

I'm annoyed with the site for being so cynical and snide about the whole thing. I think it's a beautiful idea. I'd go well out of my way to transport an Oobi if I found one.

Thinking about how things like bookcrossing have caught on, and how many people have signed up for my letter stunt, it almost seems people are more open to an idea like this than they were in the 60s. Is it the Internet? Would people be more willing to release Oobis or carry them some of the way if they could come online and track them, or report having found one?

Maybe the little critter's time has come.

Comments

[hatter.livejournal.com]

I think people are more open to the idea of loosely connecting with strangers, with less involved, more transient personal relationships. Larger communities of all sorts, be it corporate, globally distributed families (and the communications to cheaply and effortlessly send them a purely habitual 'hello' every once in a while), or the more obvious online communities where we find stranger (lj and IM both spring to mind).

Similarly look at things such as flashmob, people putting in a small commitment, to be some part of a talked about phenomenon, however fleeting the fame is. And another side of the motivation, we've seen how a huge number of little contributions can really make a mark, band aid as the oldest example that springs to my mind, but a plethora followed, slickly presented, widely targetted, most people only giving a pound, yet on that alone, £50M appears for a worthy cause almost overnight.

I'm not convinced that oobis would be as successful today though, they were a commercial product, so much today can be done because either the medium is free, or any physicial side has trivial notional value (taking a letter with you somewhere, maybe spending 5 minutes on a detour, 2 minutes printing out bookcrossing details to stick in you book) If they were re-released today, I'd expect some clever, freer clone, something such as a fast food container, marked in a specific manner, to rapidly become the 'cool' alternative.


the hatter