(Dopplr * Moo + stickers) / API = Mooplr!
The story starts out like this…
We decided we wanted to make some new stickers to give away, especially in time for dConstruct2008 in Brighton. We were trying to figure out what to do and where to get them printed, when Denise from Moo.com suggested that we use Moo stickers, each representing a city – as they reminded her of the blocks that we use in the Dopplr ’sparklogo’.
We thought this was a great idea, especially as we thought we could go one further and actually generate the city stickers directly from our database, to ssatisfy our near-constant obsession with visualising the world of Dopplr.
MattB got to work making a small bit of code that produced the top 78 cities as colour blocks, to a design template I made in Adobe Illustrator and saved as SVG file for him to manipulate.
With help from our friends at Moo, we were able to interface this directly with their API, creating a limited-edition 100 sticker books to give away.
They went down really well at the event, and we’re starting to collect pictures of people stickering their laptops, moleskines and sometimes themselves with physical infovis in a new Dopplr Moo Stickers group on Flickr.
Things took an unexpected and amazing turn this morning, when Denise IM’d me and let me know that someone had left a comment on Moo’s blog, saying that they really liked how the stickers looked and decided to create a little webapp to generate their own: Mooplr!
Just as we had, Mooplr gets the Dopplr API and Moo API to talk to each other to make stickers.
But Kev Lloyd, the man behind Mooplr went further, and created a simple, minimal interface to let you search for whatever cities or towns you want to make stickers for.
It’s moments like this morning that you realise that the rhetoric of “web2.0″ does have some substance to it, when it allows people to easily create wonderful stuff with what you put out there for them to play with.
Thanks Lloydie!
WOOT! lovely!
Good stuffs, good stuffs! It would be awesome if Mooplr could also import the previous places I’ve visited though. I made a set and then pressed the back button without paying attention and lost the 30 cities I had selected :(
This is such a lovely idea! Thanks for sharing! Here’s a suggestion to drive it even further: wouldn’t it be great for each Dopplr user to automatically create stickers from let’s say the 10 past and 10 future trips planned? API/web app wizards, now there’s a new challenge for you :-)
Keep up the spirit!
Hey guys – glad you like Mooplr!
Thanks for the excellent suggestions – I’m hoping to add lots of cool new features to Mooplr as soon as I can, so please do keep the suggestions coming!
Wow, thanks for the great work Kevin, I just realised that you included the past and future trip option too!! Cheers, Ju
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