The more people you share trips with on Dopplr, the more useful it gets. Reading your feedback (see the sidebar for ways to get in touch with us), we’re often asked for more ways to expand your social network and make sure that your trusted friends and colleagues are with you on Dopplr. For a long time we’ve offered the ability to find and invite travellers via networks like LinkedIn, Yahoo Mail or Facebook. However, using one of those import features is a one-off process and requires you to go back and check again frequently.

No longer! We’ve just introduced something very simple that we call Social Network Subscription. Simply select the networks you’d like to check for people you already know, and Dopplr will scan them once a week and offer you a list in your regular alert email.

The science bit

Back in March, Drew McLellan wrote an article titled Don’t Import, Subscribe in which he asked why sites like Dopplr and Flickr allowed you to find your friends on other sites, but didn’t automate the process for you. An import is useful, but why couldn’t one site subscribe to the social network of another?

The problem with checking your social data on another website used to be that it required you to give us your password (this is known as the Password Anti-Pattern). Luckily, these days most sites support some form of OAuth, which lets us access your data elsewhere without you ever giving away your password.

With this in place, it’s not a big step to go from a one-off import to a regular subscription. Here’s a screenshot of the first prototype I made, which ended up being almost identical to the final result:

As always, get in touch if you want to talk more about how it works, or have any problems or suggestions.