We’ve introduced “guest passes” – for the times that you want to send a specific trip to someone whether they’re a member of Dopplr or those not using the service yet (future members, we prefer to call them!)
They’re super-simple to use.
Just click “Share this trip” next to any of your trips…
A “Share this trip” box will pop-up.
In here you can type the name of any Dopplr member you know (we’ll show you a list of your connections)
Or – an email address of someone you want to share the trip with – perhaps a colleague or a family member who’s not on Dopplr yet. Of course you can enter as many email addresses or user-names as you want.
You can even share a trip with a group on Dopplr (more about these soon…)
You can add a short message if you want to give the person or persons you’re going to share the trip with a little bit more context.
Once you’re happy – hit send, and we’ll issue a ‘guest pass’ to the trip in email to non-Dopplr users, like this:
Existing Dopplr users will get an entry in their journal calling attention to the trip you wanted to share.
Click on the ‘guest pass’ URL, and there’s the details of the trip with any notes that have been added to it.
Remember that notes can be seen by any Dopplr user, and anyone you share the trip with. If you want to store more sensitive information with your trip, we’d recommmend you use the private description field.
You’re in control of the guest passes – and can stop sharing the trip with individuals as you choose.
So – that’s a quick tour of our new guest pass feature.
It would be remiss of me not to mention the inspiration we took for the user-experience of this feature from our friends over the road at last.fm, and over the pond at flickr who have nailed this – if we’ve made something 5% as nice as them we’ll be happy.
But, mainly we hope it makes it easier for you to use Dopplr with people not on the service yet, and of course, spreads the word for making the travel smarter with Dopplr.
This is part of series of posts reviewing things we found from our recent user-survey. One of the things you told us was that it should be easy to discover people on Dopplr. We’re going to continue to improve our search engine, so that you can find people you know are using Dopplr already – but that’s just part of the picture.
We call Dopplr a social tool – that is to say, something that gets more useful the more people you share it with. The benefits of safely sharing information and creating ‘social objects’ with people we trust is one of the most exciting things about the web.
However, we’re all getting pretty tired of telling computers over and over again who we trust, when probably there’s the same core list of people you communicate with on each new service.
We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible to use your existing social networks in Dopplr, both in terms of finding people already using Dopplr and sharing trips with them – and inviting those who don’t yet use it to join.
By going to “Find and invite”, you can do just that to find contacts across Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and LinkedIn – which has been especially popular and useful for finding the people you trust with your travel information.
Soon, we’re going to introduce a new feature that will keep Dopplr ’synchronised’ with your other social networks, so it will be easy to add connections that you’ve made with other tools.
Also, for those of you developing services or tinkering with code, we’ve taken what we use behind our “find and invite” feature and open-sourced it here.
While of course we hope more and more people start to benefit from using Dopplr, unlike some services, we won’t send email or messages to anyone without your permission. All we want to do is make Dopplr more useful to you – by fitting it into your existing online life.
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.
One of the great things about using copy as interface is how quickly you can change it if you have an idea.
This lunchtime I was looking at my Dopplr journal, and realised we should make it a lot clearer when exactly you and the people in your network are going to be in the same place at the same time.
After all, Dopplr is all about coincidences and maximising serendipity.
Tom said it would be pretty easy to do, MattB agreed and it went live this afternoon!
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…
Twitter
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.
“I spend quite a bit of time in the winter months (oct – feb) at
McMurdo Station in Antarctica and that time is completely blank in my
dopplr timeline. could you please at least add all the US Antarctic
locations (McMurdo Station, South Pole Station, and Palmer Station).
One of the most requested features we’ve had from you all is the ability to extend the sharing of information within Dopplr to the entire internet.
We conceived of Dopplr as a tool for small groups of people to share important information with those they trust, but we always thought there would be a public component if we could do it right without compromising that core of the service.
And, for better or worse, we though it prudent to take slow steps towards this, as we knew we couldn’t get the toothpaste back in the tube if we got it wrong.
Today, we think we’ve got there, and we’re pleased to announce the first version of our public profile feature for our “Copenhagen” release.
The public profile feature allows you complete control over what you display to the rest of the internet outside of Dopplr, or whether indeed you do so at all – you can hide your profile from the internet at any time, and prevent search engines from finding it.
It’s completely modular – meaning not only can you switch on and off the panels of information you want, but you can also embed any individual panel as a widget in your own website or send it as a link in email or IM.
As well as being able to show your past and planned trips, illustrated with maps and photos – you can publish your tips about your favourite places around the world.
A lot of people tell me that although they don’t travel a lot, they love hosting friends who do in their home cities, and want to share their tips more freely – so this is one of the first steps in making Dopplr more satisfying for them.
We’ve also, as you might expect from us, added some “data toys” for you to play with and display on your profiles. We’re hoping to add more toys from ourselves and ‘guest toymakers’ in the near future.
Personal Velocity works out your average speed through the world in the past twelve months, and then, naturally (!), compares that to the nearest speed in the animal kingdom.
If there any zoologists out there, we look forward to you correcting our estimates…
There are also a couple of (very cool) surprises in there for those of you who aren’t tearing round the planet like cheetahs, antelope or whippets…
But – like our “Your Carbon” feature – this isn’t meant to be a competition or a judgement, but offered up as something it might be fun (or terrifying!) to reflect upon, and start conversations. Perfect for a public profile we thought.
Here’s a quick screencast of me creating and publishing my public profile that shows how easy and flexible it is.
Looking forward to seeing your profiles on the internets, and as per usual, hearing any feedback and comments you have here or over on our Get Satisfaction forum.
Of course, we couldn’t resist setting ourselves a technical challenge with the design to try and do something particularly ‘dopplresque’ with them.
Here’s MattB:
I’m particularly happy that Matt [J] made the design in Illustrator, then exported it as SVG, which I templated in Rails and produced personalised editions for each of us based on our travel data, which was then rasterized to PNG (using Batik) to go to print. It’s the future.
He had hoped to be able to give a few of them out at Reboot10, but unfortunately due to illness he’s had stay home.
So instead of making some announcements there this week, we’ll be doing them here on the dopplrblog instead…
How does Dopplr know which city you mean when you type in your destination? It looks up the name in a database, and tries to find a match. We have information on over 150,000 world cities but several travellers have asked for better coverage. So we’ve been doing some work behind the scenes to improve it.
It’s difficult to get the location right every time, for lots of reasons; partly because the same place name might be spelt differently in different languages; partly because there are many places that share the same name.
We call our database “the gazetteer”. We’ve been adding new technology to make it work smarter, including data from a free service called Geonames. Geonames makes this possible by kindly licensing their data using a Creative Commons license.
Our aim is to add all the cities Geonames knows to our gazetteer. We’re adding 100,000 new cities every day, and will keep doing so until we’ve got information on 2.4 million places around the globe.
We’re also including destinations that aren’t cities – things like islands, national parks, and ski resorts. So in future, Dopplr is more likely to recognise names of places you’re travelling to. We’ve made other changes to the gazetteer too, tweaks to the way it guesses which destination you mean when lots of locations share the same name.
Finally, we’re now taking a nightly data feed from Geonames, which means that newly added or edited cities will also be incorporated into our database. So if there’s a place you care about that isn’t in Dopplr, you could help us and the whole Geonames community by going to Geonames and contributing the information.
This smarter, faster gazetteer will hopefully make Dopplr easier to use. Please contact us if you have any questions about it.
So please welcome DopplrHQ to the world and your twitterstream, where a small plastic rabbit will be tweeting merrily about, amongst other things – new stuff before anywhere else, service announcments, answers to questions you have about Dopplr, and (almost inevitably as it’s Twitter) fascinating ephemera like what we had for lunch…
![[Dopplr] Matt Jones shared a trip with you](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3035/2859336592_b2d4a0299d_o.png)
