Working on new ‘affordances’
‘Feature Creep’ is a constant temptation when building a system. We’re trying very hard not to add new features – instead, we’re trying to make things easier, more powerful, and more flexible for our fellow travellers.
We prefer to talk about adding ‘affordances‘ – additions and improvements to the tool-like aspects of the service that amplify the benefits of using of the service and our end-goals: increasing serendipity in the world around your travels.
Currently, amongst other things, we’re working on improving the way you can nominate and describe your travels, and manage the people who can and can’t see that information easily and, most importantly, with a politeness that befits…
We’re going to be using this blog to announce new ‘affordances’ and get your feedback on them.
Watch this space!
Okay, I’ll suggest three affordances in what I suspect to be increasing order of difficulty (though I can’t be sure):
* The ability to individually designate the start and end dates as being travel dates. For example, I might be traveling on the 20th but really regard the 21st as the first day I’m “available” in my target city. Conversely, I might have an overnight flight and so regard the last day of my visit as not a travel day, while I’ll be home by the start of the next day.
* A watchlist for nearby cities. Right now, I list my home as “Cleveland” because if I select my actual home suburb (Cleveland Heights), I don’t know that I’ll see trips by others to Cleveland—nor that they’ll see me as living there. (If I will, it would be nice to know that in the UI.) Similarly, someone living in New Haven might want to watch travelers to both New York City and Boston.
* The ability to input flight numbers and days, and have the actual flight schedules pulled in from airline sites. This would make possible the “we have connections at the same time in the same airport even though we’re headed totally different places” meetup that’s so rare but so delightful.
Thanks for Dopplr!
I would love to have my actual Homecity presented and not a nearby suburb.
I live in Rotterdam, I have entered this when I subscribed and all of a sudden “Vlaardingen” is my homecity. And I cannot change this anywhere (apparently)
To illustrate the emotional stress this causes: This is similar to when someone in Helsinki would be placed in “Vantaa” by the system :-)
Or “Amsterdam” vs “Purmerend” :-)
Please correct this bug soon :-)
–Boyd
How about more places in the system? Or a better handling of you not knowing where I am going? I fill in all the dates and text, then get a message you don’t know where the place is… Try mashing up with geonames.org :-)
I too would love to see my home city actually posted, not be represented by one of its suburbs. South Brisbane lies south of the Brisbane river, part of the much larger city of Brisbane, capital of the state of Queensland in Australia. The only Brisbane listed in your gazetteer is that satellite town of San Francisco; and the latter isn’t even as big as Brisbane in Australia.
Then there is no Vienna (Austria) offered unless you know it is called Wien. And please do tell me what the difference between Delhi and New Delhi is. I can go on.
Please fix these annoying bugs before contemplating the downsides of feature creep. It really isn’t hard to get an accurate gazetteer of global place names incorporated in the system, so why spoil such a wonderful concept with basic mistakes like these.
Philip Smith said: “Please fix these annoying bugs [place names] before contemplating the downsides of feature creep.”
Hear hear!
I, and several fellow Dopplrites, live in Hong Kong. For some reason, this is known as “Hong Kong (historical)” in the Dopplr database. It may be ten years since the handover to mainland Chinese rule, but I can assure you that Hong Kong is still alive and well, and has not yet been consigned to the history books.
I think one ‘affordance’ which I note tripit.com possesses is the ability to fire an unformatted email of the booking itinerary (whether from kayak, or an airline or whoever) into their system and it automatically loads the itinerary into your trips. Very handy – if further detail is required it can be added.
You provide tripit with all the email addresses you might use to send it so it knows who is sending the itinerary in.
Makes it all quick and easy.