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.
The slides from Matt Biddulph’s developer talk about Dopplr and smart integration with the rest of the web are now available on Slideshare:
This talk was given at Future Of Web Apps 2007.
Several people have asked us for a way to list their trips on their blog, so today we’ve added a blog badge system. Visit your account page and follow the link to “Add a Dopplr badge to your blog” to get the code to paste into your templates. Written in unobtrusive Javascript, it only uses a couple of lines of HTML and will work with any blogging system as it requires no server-side plugin.
You can also customise the display; if you want us to be a little vague about dates, to hide future trips and only show your current location, or even to hide the badge from visitors who aren’t fellow Dopplr travellers, that’s fine by us.