Many in the Dopplr community are freelancers or small business owners, with networks that span the globe. If you fit that description, we recommend you take a look at Going Solo, a conference made for you that’s taking place in Lausanne, Switzerland in May.

We’ve created a way for attendees to connect on Dopplr by joining a network of travellers associated with the event. You can read more about it on the Going Solo blog, and don’t forget to add your trip to Dopplr if you’re going.

UPDATE: the organisers have kindly given us a discount code for readers of our blog. Get your ticket now at a 33% discount by using this code: DPLRSG83H

It’s first-come, first-served as the code will only work for the first five registrations to use it.

On a cold winter evening in 2006, the founders-to-be of Dopplr got together in a West London pub to talk about an idea for a new kind of travel website. After much excited discussion about features and ways of working, Matt Jones agreed to participate on one condition: that whatever we made would give travellers a way to understand the carbon impact of their travels.

Today, serendipitously on Earth Day 2008, we’re launching a carbon calculator for your trips. Working with AMEE (”The World’s Energy Meter”) we can automatically build a travel carbon profile for you. Because AMEE are an impartial platform who work with many organisations that collect data or propose solutions, this means that you’ll be able to eventually reuse this profile with other services.

My 2008 carbon calendar looks like this:

Of course, the mode of transport you choose for your trips makes all the difference to their carbon impact. That means an upgrade to our trip form, which now lets you specify how you’re travelling:

Now here’s Matt Jones to give his take on why this matters so much:

One of the aspects of creating social tools that fascinates me is the ability to make the invisible visible, and what effect surfacing these patterns then has on us as individuals and groups.

For a while there have been carbon calculators on airline websites and environmentalist websites, but generally they have been about directly showing the impact of an individual action, rather than the patterns and trends influencing the actions in the first place.

That’s why I thought it was an essential component of from the start of Dopplr as a social tool for intelligent travellers to optimise their path through the world - and I’m delighted the beginnings of this are here now. Particular props to Boris and Tom for pulling off the design, which I’m pleased as punch with.

It’s a first step, and as with everything we do part of the bigger, beautiful jigsaw of the web. As MattB’s said it’s plugged into AMEE, and you might be already be subscribed to things like WorldChanging or EdenBee that can help you decide what to do about it.

It’s not enforcing any particular course of action - it’s the weighing scales, not the diet.

What we all do with this information is up to us.

We’ve just added the ability to import your contacts from your Hotmail address book and use them to find travellers on Dopplr to share your trips with. As with our existing Gmail import, you won’t have to reveal your password to us, and we won’t send email to anybody without your explicit permission.

For a long time we’ve been offering an easy way to find your friends and colleagues on Dopplr by automatically importing your Gmail contact list. We love this feature and find it very useful ourselves, but we’ve been uncomfortable with having to ask for your Gmail password as part of the process.

As of this month it’s no longer necessary to disclose your password to make the Gmail connection, as Google have recently launched a password-free contacts API. I’m happy to announce that we’ve upgraded our system to use it.

On Thursday at ETech, Gavin Starks announced that Dopplr is teaming up with AMEE to help you measure your travel carbon footprint.

We’re still putting the finishing touches on this feature, but we’re previewing it with alpha-testers this week and it’ll be launching soon. Measurement is just the first step along this road, and we’ll be working with AMEE to make sure you have pointers to the information you need to understand and act on this data.

Here’s a screenshot to be going on with:

Fire Eagle is the latest beta product from Yahoo Brickhouse. It was announced today at the ETech conference in San Diego by Tom Coates:

“Fire Eagle is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy. We’re here to make the whole web respond to your location and help you to discover more about the world around you.”

We’ve been working with their team to allow you to link your Dopplr and Fire Eagle accounts, and share your location with other trusted services that you choose and control. We can send a location update to Fire Eagle when you’re travelling, so that other services can act on that information. Of course, this can also be turned off at any time. This is similar to how we update your Facebook newsfeed on travel days if you use our Facebook application.

It’s early days for Fire Eagle and we’ve started with the simplest possible integration. If you’ve got ideas about how we could use your location data from Fire Eagle to make Dopplr a better service, we’d love to hear about them.

Fire Eagle is available only by invitation right now, but we’ve secured a small number of invitations for Dopplr users. They’re available, first come first served, at our Fire Eagle page. Watch this space for further Fire Eagle news.

As Matt alluded to in his recent post, we’ve been putting in some extra work on one of Dopplr’s core themes: serendipity. As of today, we’ve added “nearby” and “near-miss” coincidences. You can now see when someone adds a trip to a place near where you’ll be, and see who you’ll just miss by a day or two. We hope that both these features will help you get more out of your trips. You’ll also get these notifications in your journal and email alerts. There are examples of each in this screenshot:

If you’d like to hear more about the thinking that goes into designing features like this, you might enjoy watching Matt’s talk “Designing for SpaceTime, Building in No Time” recorded last week at the Interaction ‘08 conference.

Today we’ve added a tiny but very useful feature to the site. If you look at any individual trip page or list of trips, you’ll now see a “Copy this trip” link. When you click it, it’ll take you to an “Add a trip” form, pre-filled with all the details of the trip you were looking at.

This week we’ve launched two super new ways to browse your trip information.

Trip pages

Every trip on Dopplr now has its own page that gathers everything we know about the trip. Follow the ‘More details on this trip’ link on your trip list to see.

Trip pages are a place to keep private notes, to read comments left by others, and to see who’s there at the same time. They gather related information: who do you know who often visits there, and who lives there. There’s a sparkline visualisation so you can see how busy the city is before and after your visit. As with everything else on Dopplr, trip pages are only visible to travellers you share trips with, and only display information from travellers who share trips with you.

You can now register your Flickr account with us, and if you look at a trip from the past then we’ll use Flickr’s API to pull in photos taken on those dates (and, for data packrats, any tagged with the machine tag dopplr:trip=xxx where xxx is the number from the trip page’s URL). If you use our Facebook app then we’ll do the same thing with your Facebook photos. Incidentally, this means you’ll be able to find contacts from Flickr who are also Dopplr users on our Invite Via Other Networks page.

We’ll be adding lots more detail and features to trip pages over time. If you’ve got ideas about what further information we can collect about your trips (or gather from other websites like we do with Flickr and Facebook), use the site feedback to let us know.

Journals

Your journal is your summary of everything that’s happening on Dopplr that relates to you - every trip you’ve taken, every new traveller you’ve shared trips with, and every travel coincidence. There’s a calendar widget so you can explore your trip history. This journal tab also appears on other travellers’ pages, so if someone shares their trips with you then you can explore their trip history too.

The journal has a Web feed that has all the same information in it. Subscribe to this feed in your newsreader and you’ll never miss a Dopplr update again. I put mine in the centre panel of my iGoogle homepage so I’m always up to date with my network of travellers.

On the Redmonk blog this week, James Govenor asks “who is the coolest from a dopplr perspective- IBM or Sun?”. IBM and Sun are both listed in the Dopplr 100, which means any Sun or IBM employee can join Dopplr’s beta immediately. James wants to know which of these two global companies is most open to using new web technology to improve their business travel.

Sun’s Pat Patterson has already responded, and Chris Dalby asks the same of Microsoft.