While we generally release a new version of the service fairly regularly, there’s always something that’s ready-to-rock; and just this week we’ve put live a number of improvements and new features that we’ve been working on beside some of the major new stuff that’s coming soon.

First up, there’s now the ability to add a ‘multi-hop’ trip - something that a lot of you have been asking for. More on that in a separate post.

Secondly - we’ve made some improvements to our tools to manage how you share information with people.

Celia, our community design manager took the lead on that one, incorporating your feedback and our drive to try make everything as simple, elegant and clear as we can.

Over to Celia for her take on the process:

“Redesigning the ‘Connections’ pages was my first design task at
Dopplr. It seemed daunting at first but turned out to be a lot of fun.

We knew that the existing pages were too complicated and that we could
make them better. But instead of relying on our own sense of what
could be improved, we asked our travellers to tell us what they
thought. So we posted a question up on Get Satisfaction and got lots
of fantastic responses - it was really exciting to watch them come in.
A huge thank you goes to everyone who helped us out.

We didn’t incorporate all the ideas there into this version of the
design - there’s always a process of pick and choose that you go
through when coming up with a coherent scheme. The things that didn’t
make it this time round are definitely on file for future reference,
though.

After taking in people’s comments, the next step was to sit down and
digest it and come up with some sketches. The main aim was to keep the
pages as clear as possible - they show lots of different kinds of
relationships and the goal was to make it really easy to see what was
what.

The main changes you’ll notice are that we’ve condensed four tabs down
into just two, and made the titles of the sections within each tab as
explanatory as possible. Hopefully the new version makes it easier to
see who’s who in your Dopplr network.”

Lastly, we’ve given various things like our page headings a spring-clean to make search and other functions easier to find.

We’ve also redesigned our city pages.

This one makes me very happy - I think the guys did a beautiful job on them.

Over to Boris for some colour-commentary on that:

“While adjusting a few things here and there to better fit our not-so-incredibly-tight grid layout (mea culpa!), I was recoding the block that holds the Google Map on the individual trip screens. In so doing, it stretched out to 100% over on the Place screens. While in this state it clearly broke everything around it, I immediately thought “my, that’s pretty…”

A bit more sculpting, a few discussions with the team and it was agreed that it was pretty… and promptly forgotten for about 5 weeks (haha).

We added it to the to-do list maybe two weeks ago - and in a blaze of activity, Tom pulled in the incoming future-trip parabolics, fixed a map-centering issue and made beautiful colour-coded custom place-name markers et voilà.

We can haz new Place screen headers with better communicating maps! Yatta! Please to enjoy!”

This is one of the reasons I love working on Dopplr as a designer - that we’re able to work with our users on improving things, and also those wonderful moments where you accidentally discover a better way to do something by breaking it… Serendipity!

Flying with Radar Badge on PMOG, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

GameLayer’s first product - the Passively-Multiplayer Online Game or “PMOG” launched this month, and we’re very proud to say we’re part of the game-grid.

Well, everything on the WWW is part of the game-grid for PMOG, as you play the game by simply using the web everyday - but advance your score and status in the game by exploring, creating and interacting with other players like you would in massive online game worlds like World of Warcraft.

Status-symbols in the game come in the form of achievement badges, and if you play PMOG and visit Dopplr.com once a week for a month, you’ll get the “Flying with Radar” shield you see above.

PMOG’s philosophy of serious play infecting the web is something we’re all for, and we were very proud to see them reference Dopplr as an example in their recent talk at Futuresonic08 in Manchester, where we were also talking about social tools and cities (slides coming soon!)


Congratulations to our friends at GameLayers on the launch of PMOG, and congratulations in advance to you if you earn a Dopplr PMOG badge!

Dopplr "badgegeist" Physical Prototype by Jerakeen, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

Tom mocked this up really quickly this morning.

It’s a dynamic version of our logo showing the city colours of where people are on trips to right now. It’s our equivalent of that LED sign that Google used to have on their wall showing current search queries… except a lot slower…

Currently it’s mocked-up using the crystal-case packaging of a Jawbone headset and an iPod Touch that’s connected over wifi to the script that generates the logo.

Here’s a Flickr video (or “long photo”) showing the componentry…

We’re going to try and make a bigger version for our office wall with RGB leds and an arduino as a summer project… Stay tuned!

badgorama, originally uploaded by jerakeen.

As MattB said - it’ll remind people of a certain age (including us) of a ZX Spectrum loading screen…

Amongst the supposed chaos, Ben mailed us to ask if he was the first to snap our logo at the new Heathrow Terminal 5.

As far as we know, it is!

If you’ve taken a picture of our logo on your travels, let us know…

Click here to order yours from ImageKind.

Ours arrived today, and it looks fantastic up on our office wall:

Very excited to announce that Celia Romaniuk is going to be joining us part-time to turn up the heat on the stew of feedback, comments, blogs and conversation that we have around Dopplr and help turn it into sweet, nutritious new functionality and design.

We wanted to make a lot better use of the passionate and vocal users we’ve got, and Celia’s role is going to be both working with Dan Gillmor to reach out to them (you?) and understand what’s working and not-working-so-well for them; and working with us in the development team to turn that into working reality as fast as possible.

Celia’s worked as an interaction designer for about 10 years, for companies like Razorfish,
the BBC and Skype.

Last year, she relocated from London to Sydney with her partner and little boy; so our timezone coverage of the globe is almost complete!

She says:

“…the places I’d most like to travel to right now are London, New
York and Helsinki. That the places I will actually travel to this year
are the Lamington National Park in Queensland, Nannup in Western
Australia and the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney. (i.e. I’m thinking
urban, but I’m getting nature - not that that’s a bad deal at all, now
that I think about it :)”

Welcome/Terve Celia!

We got great reaction to our Raumzeitgeist post, including a lot of queries about the data-set and, unfortunately, some confusion over what we were showing in the main image.

Most people assumed (probably due to me omitting the details - my bad) that we had plotted every trip that people had made last year.

Here’s the amazing part - even with the coverage of the globe shown on that map, it’s not nearly everywhere Dopplr travellers went!

What we are showing are what we call ‘Cluster Cities’ which is the basis of some new functionality you might have already noticed if you’re a Dopplr user that’s been studying their journal feeds/emails closely.

Rewind to Reboot, Copenhagen at the end of May 2007.

We’re sitting on the grass in the sunshine with a bunch of early Dopplr users, including Stowe Boyd and Stephanie Booth - when Stephanie is the first to voice something we’ve heard a lot from Dopplr users since: “make my trips more ‘fuzzy’”.

By which, she and others meant that they would like to see coincidences in the surrounding area of ‘social spacetime’ to their trip - i.e. “show me if there are going to be people I know nearby the stated destination of my trip when I’m going to be there, as I’d probably like to change my plans a little to see them.”

This is a cornerstone of our goal to help optimise travel for Dopplr users - surfacing information about such near coincidences to let them judge whether to alter their plans to make their trip more worthwhile.

We’re going to be releasing a lot of functionality to exploit fuzzy, social spacetime through the early part of 2008, but the first part of it has leaked out into the journal.

Here’s an example.

Previously, if I’d added a trip to San Francisco, I’d have missed out on seeing coincidences with people who live in Oakland, or are visiting Berkeley for instance. Now we fuzz up the edges of your trip’s destination to include those nearby, so you can make that valuable visit on the BART…

Cluster Cities are the way we’ve made this happen. To explain them, here’s Matt B. with the science bit!

To make the database queries perform well enough to implement this feature, we needed to classify cities in densely populated areas into groups. By considering groups of cities as one, we cut down the work the database has to do when calculating who is affected by someone arriving in their area. We decided that these groups should be small enough that a traveller could reasonably expect to travel between any two cities in a group within a day.

Algorithms to cluster a spatial dataset are well known and not hard to implement. Unfortunately, they take a bit of tuning and experimentation to achieve satisfying results. Intuitively we expect cities like London, Tokyo and San Francisco to be at the centres of their clusters. In reality it’s rather hard to teach the cultural/social/economic conditions that cause this to an algorithm that’s only looking at latitude and longitude.

After some initially disappointing results, I stopped looking solely at the geographical data and considered what I could do if I incorporated the historical trip data that Dopplr has built up over our first year. I quickly came to the obvious conclusion: weight the clustering by the popularity of trip destination and let our travellers decide whether San Francisco or San Jose is the gravitational centre of Silicon Valley.

In analysing the top 2000 destinations I discovered that many of the top cities are very close together — for example, Glasgow and Edinburgh are only 40 miles apart. Again I used our trip data to eliminate overlaps. Within any 50 miles radius, only the most popular of two popular cities gets to be the cluster centre. This decision is one reason for the beauty of our central Raumzeitgeist visualisation. The layout has an appealing rhythm to it because the points in popular areas are a natural and fairly efficient circle packing.

The map of Cluster Cities visited in 2007 is what we’re using in the Raumzeitgeist image, and we’ve made a KML file for you to explore it in Google Earth that you can download here, and we hope you create some of your own images / visualisations from the data.

Aaron Straup Cope who helped me create the main image also did some fun visualisations based upon mashing it up through our API with Dopplr’s city colour-coding (as described previously) that I’ve illustrated this post with.

If you make something shiny - tag it “raumzeitgeist“, or let us know and we’ll try to blog it here.

Have fun!

UPDATE: You can now buy a poster of the Dopplr Raumzeitgeist 2007 from ImageKind.

While we’re busy working on new stuff for 2008, we thought it would be fun to look back at the first year of Dopplr in our inaugural “Raumzeitgeist” round-up.

Zeitgeist of course means “Spirit of the times”. You’re probably familiar with Google’s wonderful ‘zeitgeist’ report they publish annually, reflecting culture in what people were searching for that year.

“Raumzeitgeist” translates literally as “Space Time Spirit” and that’s precisely what we’ve got here. It’s about where we, the users of Dopplr, travelled through space and time on our little planet last year…

In 2007:

Dopplr travellers lived in 172 different countries (4310 cities), and visited 201 different countries (6088 cities).

52% of trips were within the same country. As you might expect, the top ten trips within the same country were all in the USA.

The average Dopplr trip was 5682 miles (each way - so if they were all round-trips the average total travel per trip was double that).

As you can see from the graph below - this average trip length results from the ‘double-hump’ displayed, where there are peaks in the 1000-2000 mile trip range and the longer-haul, 9000-10000 mile range.

The top ten trips were:

• London to Paris
• San Francisco to New York
• Helsinki to London
• London to New York
• San Francisco to Los Angeles
• New York to San Francisco
• Boston to New York
• Los Angeles to San Francisco
• London to Amsterdam
• London to San Francisco

The top ten destination countries were:

• USA
• Great Britain
• Germany
• France
• Spain
• Italy
• Canada
• Netherlands
• Sweden
• Finland

And the image at the very top of this post?

That’s a picture of Earth in 2007 as plotted by Dopplr’s travellers.

When we generated the mapping of it (and many thanks to Aaron for his help in doing so) we were stunned by the coverage - there is perhaps some all-too-predictable density and sparseness but the resemblance to NASA’s image of the earth at night inspired me to create the above graphic, summing up 2007’s Dopplr Raumzeitgeist.

Where next in 2008?

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P.s…
There’ll be more on the data, how we generated it and your chance to get your hands on it in order to make your own visualisations - in my next blog post.

Lift Conference is one of my favourite events of recent years. It’s always got a broad range of broad-minded speakers who are provocative but optimistic about the future of technology, design and society.

As a result I’m sad I can’t go this year (I’ll be speaking at the equally-exciting-but-unfortunately-scheduled IxDA08 conference) but happy that we could do a little something for those lucky enough to be heading to Geneva.

If you are attending Lift08, and haven’t added your trip into Dopplr yet*, then just click here - and you’ll magically get a trip there entered into Dopplr (with the duration set by default to the conference days, but of course you can tweak this to suit your plans), which is linked to the upcoming.org event and sporting a natty little Lift logo, so your fellow travellers can be as jealous of you as I am!

Nicolas Nova and others behind the event - along with Lift veterans - are also busily adding tips for Geneva to get the most out of your time there.

Have a great time at Lift if you’re going, and don’t forget to add any discoveries you make to Dopplr…

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* Of course, if you’ve already added the trip - you can always delete it and re-add it using the magical link if you really want the little badge!