April was an intense month for the Dopplr team with our Milan release launching both boutique hotel bookings and the ability to calculate the carbon impact of your travels. Many thanks for the all the feedback and improvement ideas we’ve received.

Now we’d like to look forward with the Dopplr Mid-2008 Travel Outlook. Where next? The image above shows where the growing Dopplr community (in the aggregate) will be travelling from May to September this year.

The top 20 city destinations are New York, London, San Francisco, Paris, Las Vegas, Chicago, Berlin, Washington, Los Angeles, Boston, Barcelona, Portland, Seattle, Amsterdam, Rome, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Dublin, Toronto and Stockholm. (To see the city pages you’ll need to sign in to Dopplr.)

Compared to the other months of the year, big movers and new entries in the top 100 destination for Mid-2008 were: Venice (jumping up 47 places), Lisbon (41 places), Budapest (39 places) and Montreal (26 places). Nice, Cannes, Florence, Athens and Black Rock City (home of Burning Man) all enter the top 100 for Mid-2008.

London continues to be the most populated “home city” on Dopplr with other cities closing in. The top destinations Londoners will be visiting in Mid-2008 are: Paris, New York, San Francisco, Dublin, Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona, Helsinki, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Lisbon, Singapore, Brussels, Munich, and Rome.

The summer months of the northern hemisphere are clearly a time for international travel. The percentage of international trips is 54% in May-September (compared to 46% during the rest of the year).

Finally a prediction: the Dopplr end-of-year travel outlook will see New Delhi, Bangalore, Shanghai and Beijing rising up in the top destinations!

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.

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.

Today, we’re excited to announce the “Singapore” release of Dopplr. Matt Jones will be speaking at the World Effie Festival starting tomorrow in Singapore. The inaugural event brings together more than 2,000 business leaders, global agency heads, creatives, brand owners, and marketing professionals. For more on the “The Coming Ad Revolution” take a look at Esther Dyson’s column featuring Dopplr in The Wall Street Journal.

The Dopplr “Singapore” release focuses on three key improvements:

1. More Happy Coincidences
Dopplr now informs you of “nearby” and “near-miss” coincidences. You can 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. Anytime you coincide with someone you can send them email by simply clicking on the “Send email?” link on the trip page. Dopplr will then send the email on your behalf and you can take it from there. We hope that both these features will help you get more out of your trips.

2. Adding trips easier than ever with calendar imports
Many heavy travellers have requested that Dopplr should automatically import future trips from electronic calendars. This is now possible. For example if you use Google Calendar you can now set-up Dopplr to “listen” to your calendar and add future trips automatically. See this blog post for more.

3. Local intelligence: tips on hotels, restaurants and unique experiences
Many Dopplr travellers have discovered the tips feature allowing you to share tips on hotels, restaurants and unique experiences in cities you know well. If you have tips you would like to share just go to the corresponding city page and click the tips tab to get started.

Thank you for your continued support and feedback. Over the next months we will continue building Dopplr into a beautiful and essential service for intelligent travellers worldwide.

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.

Click here to order yours from ImageKind.

Ours arrived today, and it looks fantastic up on our office wall:

Very excited to announce that Celia Romaniuk is going to be joining us part-time to turn up the heat on the stew of feedback, comments, blogs and conversation that we have around Dopplr and help turn it into sweet, nutritious new functionality and design.

We wanted to make a lot better use of the passionate and vocal users we’ve got, and Celia’s role is going to be both working with Dan Gillmor to reach out to them (you?) and understand what’s working and not-working-so-well for them; and working with us in the development team to turn that into working reality as fast as possible.

Celia’s worked as an interaction designer for about 10 years, for companies like Razorfish,
the BBC and Skype.

Last year, she relocated from London to Sydney with her partner and little boy; so our timezone coverage of the globe is almost complete!

She says:

“…the places I’d most like to travel to right now are London, New
York and Helsinki. That the places I will actually travel to this year
are the Lamington National Park in Queensland, Nannup in Western
Australia and the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney. (i.e. I’m thinking
urban, but I’m getting nature - not that that’s a bad deal at all, now
that I think about it :)”

Welcome/Terve Celia!