Have you tried m.dopplr.com, our mobile website? It has a simpler design than the main site, optimised for smaller screens and lower bandwidth. It should work nicely on any phone with a web browser. We’ve just made some improvements that give you better access to the Social Atlas while you’re out and about.

There are now mobile pages for eating, staying in and exploring the world’s cities – for example, where do smart travellers eat in London? The search engine has been upgraded and can now find things in your trips notes and in the Social Atlas. We’ve made subtle and tasteful improvements to the styling throughout. And if all you want to do is browse for a place to stay, you don’t even need a Dopplr account.

Dopplr gathers a view of the world’s best places to eat, stay and explore, shaped by the collective intelligence of the world’s most knowledgeable travellers. Designer Matt Jones christened this “the Social Atlas“. Here’s a bit of background on the thinking and the mechanisms that power it.

Early on after we launched the Dopplr private beta to a small crowd of international friends and industry colleagues, I posted a screenshot of some graphs on Flickr. The graphs showed sparklines of real travel patterns to major world cities, and in the description I wrote “I’m so excited about what we’ll be able to do with the dopplr dataset in the future.” Now Dopplr is a well-established site, we’re thoroughly enjoying the opportunity to wield data as a tool to make better services.

There are plenty of great sites out there where you can find subjective reviews and star-ratings of places round the world. We wanted to do something different, building lists of the best places ranked by everything that we know about the traveller. Because of our existing community, we already know all sorts of things about our travellers’ habits – for example, we know who visits New York most often, and we know who lives in Europe. These “opinionated lists” would tell us things like where Europeans eat in Tokyo, or where frequent visitors to New York stay compared to people visiting for the first time.

Taking into account these sort of factors, we can build aggregated views based on the wisdom of particular crowds. It can be interesting to see “people who visit X also go to Y” statements, but we also have a global view:

The Shepherdess is a cafe in East London that’s popular with internet startups from the local area (us included). From the recommendation above we can see that these people are just as selective when they travel, visiting high-end coffee roasters and exclusive ice-cream bars when in San Francisco.

Discovering a city starting with places you already know is a great way to improve your local knowledge, but what if you’re new to a city? The Social Atlas has another mechanism to help sort and sift the combined knowledge of Dopplr travellers. We calculate lists of places that aren’t just ordered by plain popularity, but take into account the travel experience and social interconnectedness of people who visit.

So if you have a strong network of travellers who share trips with you, or you’ve spent a lot of time in a particular city, we take that into account when adding your data to the mix. This results in lists like the following for Austin hotels, which places the Hotel San Jose right at the top. Despite (or perhaps because of) its size and location, it beats large and popular hotels like the Hilton amongst savvy Dopplr travellers, who enjoy its serene atmosphere during the bustle of SXSW.

We’re very happy to see a new feature just launched on Flickr this week that works with information from Dopplr’s Social Atlas. When you take a picture of a great restaurant, hotel or other place to explore, you can now add a special ‘machine tag’ when you upload it to Flickr. Within minutes, Flickr’s computers will talk to Dopplr’s computers and figure out the place you mean, adding a direct link with the correct title on the relevant pages.

You can find out the machine tag to use by checking the Flickr sidebar on any Dopplr place page, as illustrated here:

screenshot by moleitau.

screenshot by moleitau.

You can read the full in-depth details on the Flickr Code Blog.

The Dopplr website will be unavailable for a short time today while our ISP upgrades our network. The maintenance starts at 4pm London time and will last for less than an hour if everything goes smoothly.

Conference season in the internet industry has arrived. Heading for New York next week for the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference 2009? Join the group for the conference and don’t forget to add your trip on Dopplr!

If you use our Facebook application, Dopplr: Where Next?, then you might have noticed that your profile box got moved around when Facebook launched a redesign recently.

Under the new design, applications go in a separate tab on your profile called “Boxes”. This is often an improvement, because it reduces the clutter on your main page. However, we think our profile box does a rather good job of telling your friends where you are in the world. So we’ve written some instructions on how to move it back to your main profile.

Start at your Facebook profile. Find the tabs at the top of the page and hit “Boxes”:

Your Dopplr profile box has a pencil icon at the top right. Click on this to show the “Edit Box” menu, then hit “Move to Wall tab”:

Voila, your main profile page now contains your Dopplr box:

This week we’ve launched a revamp of the first pages you see after you log in. These new “traveller overview pages” look like this:

They’re designed to bring more of the important information about upcoming coincidences and trips together in one place. Look in the Your Trips tab for an easy way to browse your old trips, something many of you have asked for.

Look out for another blog post soon, in which Celia Romaniuk will go into detail on the design thinking that went into this revision. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think.

Did you know that there’s a special Dopplr user on Twitter that is there only to receive messages from you, which then get turned into trips on Dopplr? You can send it a private 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.

How does it work? First, you have to follow dopplr user on Twitter and register your Twitter username with us. We check twitter regularly using their API for your messages. Then, like our other methods of automatically receiving trips (like email or SMS), we process your twitters using a heuristic method of scanning for cities and dates, influenced by your trip history.

It works well for simple return trips. If you’re going on a trip with many stops, we’ve got a sophisticated multi-stop trip editor on the website for you.

Look in your account settings for details of how to turn this feature on.

Last month we hosted an enjoyable evening for Dopplr travellers at the offices of Monocle magazine in London. Thanks again to everyone who came along; travellers from all over the world were present. We all know the value of events in keeping in touch with our international network, and we’ve been working hard to support that on Dopplr. Using our new “groups” features, we’ve started to create groups for events across several industries. A few upcoming examples: DG New Context Tokyo; ad:tech New York; Monaco Media Forum; SIME; Nokia World; LeWeb ‘08 Paris.

At Dopplr we believe deeply in the beauty of information. Not only are event groups useful to keep track of people you meet and want to stay in touch with, we’re producing some attractive visualisations of travel patterns around the events. See our previous blog post for a great example from the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo Europe.

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.