The Dopplr Barcelona release: adding places to the Social Atlas
Today at the SIME event in Barcelona, we launched the next phase of the Social Atlas and gave a sneak preview of the new Dopplr iPhone app (codename Spitfire) that we’ll launch, Apple willing, next month.
Since we introduced the idea of the Social Atlas earlier this year, the growing Dopplr community has shared tens of thousands of interesting places in cities around the world. What kind of places? Unique hotels. Good restaurants and cafés. Well-known and little-known delights to explore.
Wherever you see a place on Dopplr you can click on the green “+” next to it to say you’ve been there. If it was an especially good place, click a second time to say you’ve been there and liked it. If you want to undo all of this, just click a third time.
But what if you can’t find the place you have in mind? Now you can easily add the unique places you’ve found to Dopplr. Every city, for example Barcelona, has Eat, Stay and Explore sections, and each section has an ‘add a place‘ link which allows you to tell everyone about your own places in that city.
Dopplr will remember all the places you’ve marked, which means it’s easy for you to find them again the next time you repeat that journey. Your tips will also be shared with your network, saving them time and hassle next time they’re in the same area.
Over time, we can anonymise and aggregate all the recommendations that have been added to Dopplr. This is the Social Atlas itself: think of it as “pop charts” for cities around the world reflecting the collective knowledge of smart travellers. It’s still early days, but we are very excited by the potential.
Wow, it’s lovely to be able to add new places to explore.
The click-on-the-tick-to-say-you-liked-it interaction doesn’t seem to be the most intuitive or discoverable thing in the world though! There’s a title tool-tip, admittedly, but how about a hover effect on the button, or some text on the page as a prompt?
[...] get any benefit out of Dopplr and for others to get benefit out of your Dopplr usage. Not anymore. Now you can go back in time and say where you have been, where you have stayed and what you thought of each. Dopplr needs to be [...]
I like the new feature, being able to to mark which places you eaten at, slept at, explored, etc. A few requests though: 1) it would be great if you could mark when you have visited the spot, and then sort on date instead of location or A-Z. 2) I’d like to be able to leave notes for places I’ve been (for instance, to write down why I liked or not liked a place, which items I picked for dinner, etc). 3) Currently one can only say “been there” and “been there and loved it”. A “been there, hated/disliked it” option is missing.
I like the new feature, but I would like to know how you can delete an address that was entered in error or not found right?