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.

I’m writing this from the second afternoon of the Future of Web Apps conference in London. It’s been great to see so many developers, designers and entrepreneurs come together from across Europe.

If you’re an attendee, we’ve made you a Future of Web Apps ‘08 Dopplr group that you can join and use to see where everyone came from, share tips on London and share your travels with new contacts from the conference after you leave.

I gave a talk on the first afternoon, on the developer track. Entitled “Dopplr: made of messages”, it’s an overview of how we use message queue technology on our servers and why it’s so useful to developers when building scalable web systems. Here are the slides, complete with notes. Do get in touch if you’re a developer and would like to discuss the topic in more depth.

Several of the Dopplr team are in Amsterdam today to attend the Picnic ‘08 conference. Look out for us, and get yourself some of our new stickers.

At 4.20pm on Wednesday, Matt Jones is speaking on a panel entitled
The Emerging Real-Time Social Web.

Update: here are the slides from Matt’s talk on the panel

“With ubiquitous internet connections and a surge of connected mobile services, slices of reality can be saved that people could not capture before. Saving and sharing our presence, we can feel those of others as well. We are on the verge of a reality with ‘social peripheral vision’, in which ambient friendships flourish and life stories and life’s details are stored, shared and searchable.”

Linda Stone is moderating the panel. We were delighted to read rthat a Dopplr coincidence with Linda was a factor in danah boyd finding an exciting new job at Microsoft R&D. A lovely example of the
Brave New World of Digital Intimacy.

If you’re travelling to the conference, you might like to join the Dopplr Picnic ‘08 group we’ve created for the event. Add your trip, see where everyone has come from, share tips on Amsterdam, and use the member list to keep in touch after you leave.

Today we’re announcing a new round of funding at Dopplr. We’re very excited about this news. For the details, here’s our press release in full:

International group led by Esther Dyson, Tyler Brûlé and Thomas Glocer invests in online service for sharing travel intentions

London and Helsinki, 16 September 2008 - Dopplr, the online service for smarter travel, has announced a second financing round from a group of prominent international investors — all users of the service. The funding will be used to expand the service globally from its strong base in Europe.

The new investors include Esther Dyson, Tyler Brûlé, Thomas Glocer, Yat Siu, Aditya dev Sood, Lars Hinrichs, Joshua Schachter, Brian Behlendorf, Ami Hasan, Daniel Sachs, Joshua Cooper Ramo, Kim Weckström, and Azeem Azhar. Saul Klein, who invested in this round, also invested in the previous round together with Martin Varsavsky, Reid Hoffman and Joichi Ito.

Lead investor Esther Dyson, a frequent traveller across four continents, recently discussed Dopplr and new Web business models in The Wall Street Journal: “I’m an individual with specific travel plans, which I intentionally make visible to my preferred vendors. […] Value is being created in users’ own walled gardens, which they will cultivate for themselves in real estate owned by the social networks. The new value creators are companies – like Facebook and Dopplr—that know how to build and support online communities.”

Intention sharing and brands

“Dopplr is leading the way in intention sharing services online. It is valuable to know where your trusted friends and colleagues will be, and where you could meet them next,” said Lisa Sounio, CEO of Dopplr. “Partner brands on Dopplr will also give you relevant information and offers tailored to you. For example, when you tell Dopplr your plans to go to Hong Kong, you might get the latest intelligence from Monocle and offers from boutique hotels picked by Mr and Mrs Smith.”

Dopplr users, the world’s most frequent travellers from over 190 countries, made on average more than 10 trips in the last year. This fall they will visit 5431 cities with the top destinations being London, New York, San Francisco, Paris and Berlin. Tokyo, Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai and Dubai are all in the top 50 Dopplr destination cities. When travellers tell Dopplr about their travel plans, two-thirds of them have not yet booked a hotel and half have not yet made any travel arrangements. (Source: Dopplr Fall Travel Outlook 2008)

“We see the opportunity to go well beyond building a simple web-based community with Dopplr,” says Monocle Editor-In-Chief and Dopplr Investor Tyler Brûlé. “There’s considerable scope to use Dopplr to improve the travel experience for all by engaging in discussions with not only our members but also travel brands and government agencies seeking informed opinions.”

About Dopplr

Dopplr is the online service for smarter travel. Dopplr helps you make the most of your trips by sharing your travel plans with the people and brands you trust. The service then highlights coincidences, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Tokyo when you will be there too. You can use Dopplr on your personal computer or mobile phone. It links with many popular online calendars and social networks.

After a period of exclusive availability to selected global companies, Dopplr opened to world travellers everywhere in December 2007. With offices on London’s silicon roundabout and the Helsinki seaside, Dopplr was founded by CTO Matt Biddulph, Design Director Matt Jones, CEO Lisa Sounio and Dan Gillmor. Marko Ahtisaari is a founding investor.

Notes to editors

For more information or to schedule an interview please contact:

Lisa Sounio +358(0)405100691
press@dopplr.com

Matt Biddulph, Matt Jones and Lisa Sounio will be available for interviews in London on Tuesday 16th September.

For more information about Monocle please contact:

Emily Smith +44(0)2077254343
es@monocle.com

Investor URLs:
Esther Dyson - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Dyson (on Dopplr: http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/esthr )
Tom Glocer - http://tomglocer.com/
Tyler Brûlé - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Br%C3%BBl%C3%A9
Yat Siu - http://outblaze.com/main.php?id=about&page=about_exe#yat
Saul Klein - http://localglobe.blogspot.com/
Aditya dev Sood - http://www.cks.in/html/company_htmls/cks_people01.html
Lars Hinrichs - http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Hinrichs
Azeem Azhar - http://azeemazhar.wordpress.com/
Joshua Schachter - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Schachter
Brian Behlendorf - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Behlendorf
Joshua Ramo - http://www.joshuaramo.com/