New ways of getting your trips into Dopplr: Twitter, SMS and Email!
One of the most-requested things we hear from your feedback is “can you automate how I get my trip information into Dopplr”.
We agree that entering stuff by hand is not great.
Look! I’m doing it right now!
It’s horrible!
However, Dopplr is about your future, which, as far as we know can’t be automated (yet) and if you’re trying to optimise your travel plans before you book stuff, we need to get the information from other places, including plain-old human input.
We try to make every effort to ensure that it’s as painless as possible in the UI to enter your trips, but as always if you have any specific ideas or criticism about that, that would be great.
BUT!
We’re always working on a bunch of ways to get your information into Dopplr easily.
First up we worked on easy ways to get the information into Dopplr from your calendaring software – like Google Calendar and Apple iCal. So that if you’ve entered it once there, you don’t have to enter it again.
AND!
Today I’m really happy to say we’re taking the wraps off a number of new ways to get your future into Dopplr and share your travel information with those you trust: Dopplr by Twitter, SMS and… Email!
First up…
You can now add trips easily on Dopplr using a Twitter account.
There’s a special Dopplr ‘robot’ user on Twitter that is there only to receive messages from you, which then get turned into trips on Dopplr.
Once you’ve gone through a simple procedure to associate your Twitter account with your Dopplr username, you’ll be able to start using this feature.
You can send it a message by twittering something like
“D dopplr a trip to Helsinki on May 19th until May 23rd”
or you can also use the “@dopplr” prefix if you don’t mind the details being seen in ‘public’ on twitter.
The only constraint is we ask you to make sure to mention a placename and two dates, including the month both times.
For example:
- A trip to Helsinki on May 19 to May 23
- At SFO on September 9th. Leaving on September 20th
- I’m going to Austin on July 15 for 3 nights
Secondly…
SMS
Similarly to Twitter, you’ll have to go through a simple procedure for us to associate your mobile number with your Dopplr account, but after that you can send SMS messages with a place and a date or range of dates, and Dopplr will do the rest.
And, again, our only constraint is we ask you to make sure to mention a placename and two dates, including the month both times.
Third, and finally…
Email!
Yes – EMAIL! Who-hoo!
*ahem*
Dopplr can interpret messages you send us via email into trips and other details associated with your travels.
Again, You can send us simple messages like:
“I’ll be in San Francisco from August 18th for 4 days”
or you can forward your e-tickets, itineraries or other confirmation emails you’ve received from airlines or hotels.
The latter will create trips on Dopplr, and they’ll be stored as private attachments so you can keep all your travel arrangements in one place.
What’s more, once you’ve made a trip you can send anything you’d like associated with your destination and time you’ll be there – for instance: hotel reservations or car-rental confirmations – and they’ll get attached to it.
The trip becomes like a little inbox for anything you send that we can identify by the same place and date-range.
Just send us messages to trips@dopplr.com from the email address you originally registered with Dopplr and we’ll do the rest.
Behind all of this is an engine we’ve been developing to do what you mean from whatever you send us.
For more on that, here’s MattB with his by-now-traditional ‘science bit’:
There are an awful lot of ways to format a travel itinerary. When people asked us to extract trips from emails, we looked at our long history of e-tickets, confirmations and reservations, and scratched our heads.
Inspiration came in the shape of Apple’s last OS X release, Leopard, and an intriguing feature called “Data detectors“.
We realised that instead of creating a piece of code to decode every email format out there, we could look for patterns of dates and place names in the text (and later, other information too) and turn those into trips.
A happy side-effect of this approach is that as well as extracting information from automatic reservation emails, it works well with short text strings like “I’ll be in San Francisco from 3rd July to 7th July”. This means we can work with many hand-written emails, with Twitters, and with SMSes too.
Of course it won’t work with every variation under the sun (for example, it’s most reliable when an email contains just a return trip in a single hop), but we’ve had very satisfying results in our testing. And of course every email you send us will be added to our test suite so that our engine can get better and better over time.
So – three new ways to tell Dopplr and your network about your plans and optimise your trips. As always, do let us know what you think and how we can improve them.
We’ve got some big plans for the engine in coming months, which hopefully will make it a lot easier for you get the most out of your future travel.
Nice stuff, any chance of a Jabber/xmpp bot soon?
As a bonus a Jabber bot could easily give you a presence on Jaiku/Identi.ca too.
This is really good.
TripIt.com has this down to a T with airline reservations so I’m glad Dopplr is getting in on the action. The other little benefit TripIt has is that is shows the weather for each day of your trip. This could easily be replicated by mashing up data from Google or the BBC etc.
Keep up the great work!
Very nice features!! You are doing an amazing work here!
Just another (simple) request that I am tweeting to you many times… we really need more means of transportation like boats! Here in Greece and in other countries with many islands they are really popular!
Thanks !
[...] The sexy-but-basic Dopplr has obviously decided to take a wander into less-sexy-but-more-capable TripIt’s territory and start doing parsing [...]
Congrats guys.
I think the two Matt’s know this is a feature I’ve been pestering them about for a while. I agree that the original benefit of Dopplr is/was to work out specific travel arrangements after the system telling me who might be in my destination – so I can make sure I can meet up with them.
But the reality (for me at least) is usually book first, find out afterward. I’m also more likely to visit Dopplr site now to check details rather than piping in via TripIt.
Interested to hear more about the pattern matching you’re doing, if it’s something you can share.
> Just send us messages to trips@dopplr.com from the email address you originally registered with Dopplr and we’ll do the rest.
A problem with this is that of course it doesn’t work if you use Gmail’s clever email filtering doodah: myname+dopplr@gmail.com
It’s not mentioned in this blogpost, but I stumbled across the personal unique address like hotdog.wotnot@email.dopplr.com, that you generate here:
http://www.dopplr.com/account/sending_trips
(By the way, on that page and this, it’s not neccesarily “the email address you originally registered with Dopplr”, as you could have changed it since then)
But it only picked up the outward leg on the “Expedia travel confirmation” I sent, not the
return a week later. The simpler “E-Ticket Confirmation” worked much better, though it created another draft trip rather than updating and attaching as I expected.
A good start though!
Manogr, boat travel is definitely on the of things we need to add to the modes. The transportation modes of trips are for the carbon calculations. As all our calculations are done by AMEE. We’ll have new carbon features later this year, and this is a priority.
Just used this with a trip (emailing my eticket from Ryanair) and it got dates right, but it decided I was going to Malta in Portugal, not Malta the island in the Med.
I’ve noticed before that Dopplr doesn’t seem to do priority when picking destinations – i.e. offer suggestions when picking according to some hierarchy – and in this automated case, this is probably necessary, no? I mean, it must be more likely that when someone enters ‘Malta’ they mean, the island. So it should eb possible to do some kind of ranking based on popularity across Dopplr, if there’s no other data source available.
[...] now Dopplr’s gone and added some new import mechanisms of their own. This post from the Dopplr blog (ok, it was posted back on July 8th, but it has been sitting in my queue to [...]
Tried to send older trips, but it gets all the multi legged trips wrong. It doesn’t seem too difficult, looking at the email in dopplr, it detects all the lines with depart: arrive: just right but then doesn’t connect the dots. I think this can be done, let me sketch something
Depart: A Arrive: B
Depart: B Arrive C:
Depart: C Arrive: B
Depart: B Arrive: A
Connect all consecutive lines that have Arrive in the first equal to depart in the second and build a graph like this A->B->C->B->A
Now identify nodes with the same label
A-B-C where – is a bi-directional link
Then A is home and C is the destination. Seems doable to me, at least when people forward reservations it should work. It should work with Orbitz, Jetblue, United and southwest of which I have examples.
I tried to edit the trips, but I can’t change the starting point. I am missing something or it is a shame. Please let people edit everything. So I had to delete most of them.
As far as attributions, “data detectors” were introduced in Zoe (a lesser known mail software with lots of advanced features) and made mainstream by gmail. Apple copied from them. Apple gets credited with things all the time, like touch screens and the mouse that they just made slicker and more mainstream, but belong to others. As tagertux said, tripit had this some time ago, but IMHO still problematic like your implementation.
I am interested in what you are doing, but I see also bells and whistles go in before core features, like data entry and editing. Maps can wait IMHO, even if I love maps.
Now if you could help people coordinate their travel plans before they make reservations, that would be something …
This. THIS! Is what I’ve been waiting for.
I love the idea of being able to set up trips by SMS and Twitter, but here’s a snag: those things are best when I can’t get on a computer. But if setting up a trip that way only creates a draft trip, what’s the point? I still have to get on a computer to publish it.
I recognize that, given the possibility for misinterpretation outlined in James Bridle’s comment right above me, this draft default is probably a good idea. But it’d be nice to have the option of sending SMS/Tweet/E-mail trip info to draft OR straight to a public trip.
This site’s getting better every couple days. It’s exciting to be a part of it.
Please add a one-click unsubscribe link to your bulk e-mail messages.
[...] DOES IT AGAIN Jump to Comments DOPPLR is keeping up with the Jones’s and making life more easier to keep travel information [...]
[...] found this quote (from Dopplr blog) fascinating on how Dopplr works out the the dates and other info from the doodlings we send them: [...]
I opened http://www.ietf.org/meetings/0mtg-sites.txt in my browser (Safari), and did a command-I to send it to you as an email. The result was that you set up a trip to Fall, Germany.
That being incorrect, I pulled the file, deleted “provisional” trips, changed one that I happen to know more about to reference Hiroshima, and basically sent
November 16-21, 2008
Location: Minneapolis, MN, USA
March 22-27, 2009
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
July 26-31, 2009
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
November 8-13, 2009
Location: Hiroshima, Japan
March 21-26, 2010
Location: Anaheim, CA, USA
November 7-12, 2010
Location: Atlanta, GA, USA
as separate emails
It set up a trip to Anaheim in March 2009, a trip to Atlanta in 2012, a trip to Stockholm this week, which it noted meant traveling from Dublin, where I happen to be, and Hiroshima in 2013.
You might want to think about this further…
There is a minor security issue here, as you know the SMTP protocol doesn’t normally authenticate the sender, so in brief anyone can send an Email and forge the sender part (Mail From) of it, and hence anyone can deceive Dopplr by updating someone’s else profile.
[...] Twitter and the miracle of smart data on-ramps. Dopplr’s recent blog post outlined a handful of new ways to get information into the system, including through Twitter, [...]
Green Data,
That’s true, but whenever we process an email we reply to the email address we have on record for that traveller. We also put any trip that is created into an “unconfirmed” mode for a few days until the traveller confirms that they’re correct. This means that even if someone does decide to fake your address in that way, you’ll immediately find out when the confirmation email arrives.
can i twitter upcoming links as well? ;)
[...] a few announcements: you can add trips by tweeting @dopplr, there are now dopplr groups, with more functionality coming soon, and when you share a specific [...]
I’m sorry to say that Air New Zealand itineraries don’t work. They work a treat when sending to plans@tripit.com, however. Check the recent two emails send to the ’siggy’ user and you’ll see the destination city and return address are quite wrong. In addition, I’m used to having the flight number and times recorded by TripIt, and that if I export this to iCal, that the exact flight number and time shows up. This helps me make my flights and ensure I place meetings around rather than during flights, especially useful when factoring in timezones and a busy schedule! Keep up the otherwise great work!
anychance of a netvibes add option?