A Dopplr Tour
UPDATE: A new and shorter tour is now available.
A major design goal of Dopplr has been simplicity: We believe you should be able to use the site with almost no special help other than what’s in front of you on each page.
That said, we’d like to introduce a “Dopplr Tour” page that we hope will highlight some key features for longstanding Dopplr travellers as well as new ones. If you are new to Dopplr you can sign-up here.
Please take a look. Let us know how we can make it better. Like the service itself, we’ll be improving the tour as time goes on.
Meanwhile, here we go:
Below, you’ll see the main page of Dopplr after you’ve signed in. We’re assuming here that you’ve already created some trips and have some trusted friends and colleagues with whom you’re sharing some trips, and vice versa.
At the top you’ll see links to other important pages. (1) They include “Invite,” where you invite friends and colleagues to join Dopplr, plus your account settings, managing your traveller connections, Facebook integration and more.
The box below “Where Next?” is the search box (2). Click where it says “Type the name of a city or a traveller” and you’ll be inside the search box. The text you enter here can be locations or people; the latter may be in your shared-trips group or not. Press your keyboard’s Enter or Return key, and you’ll see the matches. You can share trips with your travellers you know directly from the search results.
Note the three tabs (3) in the main part of the page. Besides the current page, one shows the people who share their trips with you, and the other shows your “journal,” a record of what you and your fellow travellers have been and are going.
Click on any city name and you’ll be taken to the city page. Click on the name of a fellow traveller and you’ll see his or her page.
To add a trip, click on the “+ Add a trip” link (4) to the right of “Where’s Next” — which is what we’ll show you next.
(Note: All names you see in these screens have been “anonymized” — that is, we’ve scrambled real people’s names into not-real ones, to protect privacy.)
Adding a trip is easy. Just fill in the destination. (1) You can use place names, airport codes or even postal codes, and we’ll try to figure out where you’re going. The database of place names doesn’t include everything, but it’s quite comprehensive. (Let us know if you don’t find a correct place name.)
Then click the start date of your trip. A calendar will pop up (or down) to let you select the day (2) you plan to arrive in the new place. Then fill in the finish date the same way and add an optional note describing why you’re taking the trip. This note will be visible to people you share trips with.
The Invite link takes you here. Fill in the name and mail address of someone you want to invite into Dopplr, and add an optional personal message (which will in turn be added to the standard invitation message they’ll receive). You can invite more than one person at a time by clicking the link to the right of the name box, and you’ll see this screen:
Type in the names of people you want to invite. Don’t worry, you can do more than three; the page automatically expands, giving you as many Email fill-in boxes as you need. Keep in mind that everyone will get the same personal message you create from the box at the bottom.
Inviting people from other networks you may have joined is easy, too; click on that tab at the upper right and you’ll see this:
The example above shows you how to find out which of your Google Mail” contacts (using gmail.com and googlemail.com addresses) are already members of Dopplr, and how to invite others who are not.
Other networks we can help you import from include Twitter, Flickr and Facebook (more later on Facebook).
Your “fellow travellers” (yes, we get the joke…) are the heart of Dopplr’s value for almost everyone.
Fellow travellers are people who share trips with you, and the middle tab from the main page shows where the ones who are on the road are at the moment, and how long they’ll be there.
Click on anyone’s name for more information on their schedule, including a closer look at their individual trips.
The Journal page, below, is also a key place to visit.
Your Journal is a list of what you’ve been doing, and what your fellow travelers have been doing. This includes recording information about upcoming trips, sharing trips, adding tips and just about everything else.
The Journal can show just your own trip, or coincidences with other travellers who’ll be in the same place, or everything. You can also receive Journal information via email, as we’ll describe a little later.
An asterisks next to a name (1) means that there’s a coincidence — you and the other traveller will be in the same city at the same time. The colours are coded by city but have no significance beyond that. (See this posting for an explanation of the colour system, which we think is very cool but not especially relevant to this tour.)
Managing your connections to your trusted friends and colleagues is another essential part of Dopplr:
We have many ways to help you manage your Dopplr connections. The first tab shows you people who have shared their trips with you. The ones highlighted in yellow (1) — always at the top of the list — can’t see your trips. If you want to share your trips with them, click the “Share trips” link (2), and they’ll be notified by email that they can now see your trips.
If you don’t want to see their trips, you can “mute” them by clicking the “Mute” link (3). They won’t be notified of this, however.
The next tab shows people you’re sharing your trips with:
The people who aren’t sharing with you are highlighted in yellow. If you decide to stop sharing trips with someone, you can click the “stop sharing” link (1); they won’t be notified. Muting and unmuting works the same as before; it’s about whether you choose to see someone else’s trips, not the other way around.
The “New travellers on Dopplr” tab shows you a list of people who’ve joined recently after being invited by people in your own collection of trusted travellers. It’s entirely possibly you know some of these new members. Sharing your trips with any of them is easy; just click the “share trips” link (1).
The final tab in the connection management page gives you a list of people who are in specific networks of travellers. Again, we only include people who can see trips of some of your own fellow travellers, as well as some who may have shared trips with you but who can’t see your own trips.
Note: We’ll be extending this feature in coming days; stay tuned…
Now let’s turn to the individual city pages, which are growing more useful all the time.
Each place has its own page, with lists of who in your trusted travellers group lives there and who’s visiting (and who’s coming soon).
If this is your home city, we suggest that you subscribe to a Web feed (click the orange button (1) to the right of the link, to the right of the map, that invites you to do this); or create a calendar listing of who’s visiting and when (2). Note: if you live in a popular city, the calendar view may be very, very busy with activity.
Note the tab about “tips for this city” — this is where we learn from each other, as we’ll see below.
The idea behind the Tips page is to share — with trusted friends and colleagues, whether they’re visiting or live in a particular place — some of what we know about a particular place. We hope everyone will post something useful about their home city in any case.
We’ll ask people whether they agree or disagree (1) with a particular tip. The green squares (2) give a sense of the overall feeling of the community. We’re not trying to create a mega-sophisticated system here, but rather help travellers know how the larger Dopplr world feels about specific places. (And we’ll ask the community to flag tip postings that may violate our collective sense of civility, though we don’t expect that to be a significant problem at all.)
The tips will also have “tags” (3) that help identify what the subject is about. As more and more Dopplr travellers add tips, the value of tagging will become clearer.
Adding a tip is easy, and we even suggest tags based on what you’re writing about. We’ll be talking more about this feature when we roll it out for everyone soon.
Next: managing your account…
We offer many ways to help you manage your account and various settings. Such as:
Email preferences are intensely personal. So we give you many choices of how to get (or not get) emails detailing your most recent Journal information. You can set the frequency (1) of emails to weekly, daily, or not at all.
We do like letting you know about new features and events on occasion (items we also discuss here on the blog). But, again, we also know that some folks don’t want any mail from us, ever, after signing up. If you don’t want these emails, tick the box (2) and we’ll take you off that list.
Privacy is a big deal to us, too. That’s one reason why everything about Dopplr is “opt-in” — that is, you have to specifically share your trips with someone in order for them to see where you’ll be. We hope the explanations are clear, but if not please let us know.
We’re working to make Dopplr increasingly useful for people who rely on mobile phones and mobile data. Once you’ve registered your mobile number with us, you can add trips and notes with SMS text messages. Currently the phone number is in the United Kingdom, but we plan to add other local numbers for at least some other countries.
(Note: We’ve blocked the phone number, as it’s the actual number of one of our founders…)
We also have launched Dopplr Mobile, a version of the service that runs entirely on your mobile phone. See this posting for more on that.
Remember, earlier, when we mentioned Facebook? The final element in this brief tour is about that.
Yes, we have a Facebook application. You can set it up via our “Where Next” page there, with a confirmation on Dopplr.
To do this, visit Dopplr: Where Next? on Facebook and follow the instructions. Your Facebook-Dopplr friends will see your trips in a small profile box on Facebook pages, as in the example above. On travel days, we’ll update your mini-feed to tell you friends where you’re travelling to or from.
So that’s it for this initial tour. We’ll be tweaking this page over time, and putting this information on the main site as well. Let us know how we can improve it.
Hi Dan,
I really enjoy the simplicity experienced in Dopplr, and that’s why I broadcast to friends inviting them using it to communicate our trips. But without a help console, some experiences are still really frustrating. For instance, I and Kerim (2 crazy web 2.0 evangelists, maybe other users also) emailed to ask/suggest about “adding new city” in Taiwan after trying our best for several times (still got no response now :( ) I certainly feel a “traditional” help desk, or an web 2.0 mutual help community should solve this kind of emergency needs.
Cities are also identities. Login with a wrong city just like having a wrong avatar show up in public space every time.
best, ilya
Thanks for the kind words, and our apologies for the poor communications… we’re working to improve the help on the site.
And what city in Taiwan are you trying to add?
How do you deal with the security risk, certainly here in the UK, that anyone can look you up in the on-line phone books to see where you live? This has got to be a thieves’ charter – “Hey Mr Burglar, I’ll be away from home on this day!” No thank you.
AN INVITE – pls. send an invite!
Tim, the only people who see your trips are the people you explictly share them with.
Harraj, you don’t need an invitation. You can join directly:
http://www.dopplr.com/join
This is completely off topic, but Helvetica Neue is so gorgeous when it’s big like this I just wanted to add some more type to the page. Hot!
Peace.
Lee
“A major design goal of Dopplr has been simplicity:”
Since you make this statement I would just like to highlight the fact that your column becomes more readable when I narrow the width of my browser to allow 65 characters of column width and much less so as the browser window is widened.
You might like to consider controlling this.
Never wondered why fine print and EULA are so hard to read?
Other than that I agree with the comment of gorgeous as above, although I would like to see the font slightly smaller.
I like Dopplr for the Flickr integration (Which is spooky cool) and Facebook widget to show upcoming trips.
One item however: It is not easy to find, share or display your travel history – at least not that I have found. What’s the point of Flickr integration if you can’t output an RSS feed or create a special page of past travels?
I travel a lot and I just entered two years of trips – would be cool to do what Plazes does and allow me to share these easily.
So for now – I use Doppler to tell friends where I am headed and Plazes to tell them where I have been.
Hmmm? Maybe I need to create a mashup, maybe I’ll call it “DOPLA”
Also would be cool if you added a ‘Blog This” function to events” to keep me from entering my upcoming events in THREE places now.
@Doug Young, I like the fact that I get to choose how wide it is. Some people prefer longer lines, some shorter, and if I needed to increase the font-size I could increase the width to maintain my ideal line-length. That’s the beauty of liquid layouts.
I would love an email alert when someone I share with is coming to Phoenix and when someone I share with is going to the same conference I’m going to. Does the site already have this and I just haven’t reached critical mass with fellow travellers?
Also, can you get it integrated with Flock?
Guys. I highly recommend that you create a video tour/introduction of Dopplr. Something that is easier to watch and promote than reading the above. You could create a flash presentation with something like Camtasia Studio (no I don’t work for Camtasia) that is easy to do and very professional looking. Just an idea. Very interesting concept.
I am also curious to know how you may integrate this with Microsoft Outlook Calendar so that business users don’t have to type in their plans in two places. Are there plans to have an enterprise version?
Dave, I’m working on some video tours of key features. Stay tuned, as it were…
The calendar works one way right now — Dopplr to desktop calendars. We’re well aware that folks want to go the other way, and it’s high on the priority list.
Dopplr could be a very useful utility; do you have a schedule for a Plaxo interface yet?
Plaxo turned out to be a superb email address synchronization platform for me; I really would like to prevent having to enter loads of searches in Dopplr manually, just to find out which of my business contacts use it already. Until some solution comes along that prevents the fragmentation and proliferation of my address book all over a few dozen web-based utilities and communities, I will settle for Plaxo as a synch tool.
I could live with an Outlook sync, though, as Dave suggested – I would just suggest not only to offer syncing selected parts of the calendar, but also the address book.
Thomas, the sync we have now is with the networks we’ve listed. We’ll be trying to add more, but I don’t have an ETA on that.
Love your site it’s so simple and clean. I have just joined and will use when travelling. Who designers of your website ? they deserve a lot of credit, well done
Can you bring back the the privacy setting control?
Nice work guys – clean and simple. Are you doing an iphone app for Feb?
Aiya, what control is that, in particular? We’ve actually added privacy settings.
Can I add/edit past travels?
In my personal opinion I don’t think that dopplr is really as simple as you said.
I’ll give you some few example:
- Imagine start using it and you are in a place but not at home, you must insert the current date as the travel start to notify that you already are in that place, but is a trick.
- If you start a travel but you don’t know how long you will stay in a place, you must use an approximative date.
- Imagine you travel a lot and you din’t came back to home, actually not possible to give dopplr this information.
It’s not more easy to only say:
- I’m here (Milano)
- I will be there (London) from mm.dd.yyyy
Apart from that you had a great idea and I hope you can add these features.
May I use Dopplr to keep track of/publish conferences/speaking engagements I’ll be participating in? Either in a calendar or short list? (I.e. Charles’ speaking schedule for March 2008, or next 60 days, etc.)
Hi,
I was wondering who I can direct an inquiry regarding possible Marketing & Promotions for Dopplr?
Thank you,
Farzad Etemadi,
Email us at press@dopplr.com
Hi, I’m a little confused about how pictures on flickr appear on trips made in dopplr… any guidance would be much appreciated,
Thanks,
Andrew
When I clicked on “Take the tour”, I expected a flash-based tour with audio. Disappointed. I managed to read some of the stuff above, but it is way too verbose. Given the shorter attention spans these days (and some slick flash tours out there), it might be worthwhile to accompany this page with a flash tour. Of course, you should keep this page for those who prefer reading to any sort of animation.
My travel agency publishes my itinerary at a website http://www.viewtrip.com that includes most of the information you need in Dopplr. Is there an easy way to import or cross reference this information at viewtrip? thanks.
Wow. It’s nice, but I hope you guys try using Live Maps, instead of Google Maps.
Live Maps is a far better mapping platform, and it’s worth trying. Nice work.
Thanks for some great work on a cool new piece of software.
I’m with Thomas and Dave… Out FROM Outlook and Plaxo integration are what will “allow” me to use this. I’m no longer duplicating my inputs and efforts for every new cool tool that comes along.
Integrating dopplr into other platforms would be fantastic. Creating yet another destination site, would not.
Good luck!
Hello,
I don’t know but i think it’ possible to integrate Dopplr to my website, ((like twitter ’s short code in my php) I’m not sure, is it effectively possible? email me if it’s possible.
OK, good idea… but wow major developments to be made if to suit the business traveller. How about csv contact imports? How about creating a trip event directly from Outlook or gCal (like sending it to a personal Dopplr email address that automatically creates the trip – see GoogleDocs functionality or gCal/Outlook compatibility)? and other useful info such as events taking place in the city of travel, travel information,… restaurant ratings, hotel ratings… and by categories. Also how about being able to categorise trips (business, pleasure, holidays.)
Maybe at a too early stage for me. The idea sounds good, it is all I’d expect the Expedia/TripAdvisor to get to.
Christophe
there are lots of good ideas on this message board. would be nice if someone from dopplr every replied to them on this page.
tripit.com+Dopplr.com=perfect
Get on it. Let me know when you are done, then I’ll sign up (and even pay if you want me to).
Another request for viewtrip integration please.
Can I use the system to run a report of all trips that I have entered and calculate the number of week days I have been away from home? If I can do this, then I don’t need to keep a seperate log for tax purposes and in turn will drive me and my colleagues to use the system.
Would be nice to allow to publish several destinations in one new trip.
Also there is no travel information like events/travel notes/hotel ratings/….
But it’s really good start.
Thank you for this service.
Just came across a great combination of both worlds: http://www.tripess.com. Well it seems they are creating both worlds, because it’s not open yet, just private beta.
I did discover a blog and Twitter on the page. Looks good! I use Dopplr, but not very often anymore… Good luck and thanks for this service.
This is nice I also came across something similar however at the moment they are inactive
see: http://www.travelgo.nl
rgds
erkie