We’d like to share with you the main findings from our recent surveys of Dopplr travellers and analysis of the aggregate travel patterns of the growing Dopplr community around the world. So here, under seven broad headings, is some fresh data:

1. Willing to share travel intention, long before the trip
2. International
3. Independent early adopters of digital technologies
4. Compared to traditional frequent travellers: younger, earn more, travel more
5. Preference for unique hotels
6. For airlines, preference is widely spread
7. Recommendations rule

1. Willing to share travel intention, long before the trip

When people share a trip through Dopplr 2/3 have not yet booked a hotel and 1/2 have not made any travel arrangements at all (e.g. plane or train reservations). Dopplr is of course all about sharing where you will be and the unique places you’ve been. What surprised us is how early in the decision process people share their trips. Dopplr use is clearly part of a larger trend of declarative living – alongside services like Twitter and the status line in Facebook – where Dopplr emphasizes future location and privacy. For an excellent description of this broad phenomenon read Clive Thompson’s “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy.”

2. International

Dopplr may have the most international social graph of any social network. Over half the people on Dopplr share trips with a person from another country. Over 2/3 of the users are from outside of the United States with half of the users coming from Europe, and Asia Pacific growing quickly.

London, New York, San Francisco, Paris and Berlin are the top destination cities. However, as the plot of all Dopplr destinations in 2008 at the very top of this post shows, the tail of destinations is long and covers the entire globe.

3. Independent early adopters of digital technologies

Dopplr users are, no surprise, early adopters of online services with three-quarters claiming regular use of Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter and over half using Flickr or their own blog regularly. They are very independent in terms of making travel arrangements with 3/4 making their travel arrangements themselves either online or by phone.

4. Compared to traditional frequent travellers: younger, earn more, travel more

Dopplr travellers are highly-educated and compared to traditional frequent travellers they are younger, earn more, and travel more. Active travellers on Dopplr made on average 15 trips in the last year. In terms of sectors IT, telecoms, marketing, media and creative industries are over-represented in Dopplr travellers compared to traditional frequent travellers.

Dopplr users are more used to booking directly online with 80% booking directly on an airline website (compared with 30% for traditional frequent travellers).

5. Preference for unique hotels

Dopplr travellers prefer unique travel experiences with over 40% going for boutique hotels when they travel and 25% choosing a trusted chain. As for trusted hotel chains, the top six preferred chains for frequent business travellers on Dopplr were Hilton, W Hotels, Mariott, Starwood, Hyatt and Radisson.

6. For airlines, preference is widely spread

Broadly speaking the digital influencers on Dopplr are highly driven by price and recommendation. They are less loyal than traditional frequent travellers and their preferences for airlines are spread among many more airlines. As an example, for long haul business Dopplr travellers prefer Brittish Airways, Virgin Atlantic, Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa and United Airlines. In terms of airports AMS, SIN and HKG top the list.

7. Recommendations rule

Travellers on Dopplr are highly interested in and influenced by recommendations from their peers, especially for hotels, restaurants and places to see. The chart below shows claimed influence of recommendations on different travel decisions.

And people are increasingly receiving travel recommendations through digital channels, whether it be all-purpose communication platforms like Facebook, Email or Twitter, or newer more focused platforms like Dopplr. Face-to-face is still by far the most popular medium for travel recommendations, so digital platforms have a lot of potential for growth.

In light of the above observations, you can see why we at Dopplr are excited about building the social atlas, a system for making travel data and advice more open and sharable. Many thanks to all of you who have contributed to our research.

Note: The data above is based on two traveller surveys conducted over the last year (the second with m1ndset), m1ndset independent research into international frequent travellers at airports around the world, and analysis of aggregate travel patterns of the Dopplr community. We will be sharing a full version of our research results shortly. If you’re interested in receiving a copy drop us a line at business(at)dopplr(dot)com.

Yesterday we launched our new city pages.

We’ve had city pages as collections of information and tips for Dopplr users for over a year, and now we’re made those pages public to the internet: the first stage in creating what we’re calling a “Social Atlas” internally.

A few weeks ago we mailed everyone who had contributed a tip to Dopplr and asked if they would prefer to keep what they had posted private to only Dopplr members, and we’re happy to say no-one chose to – so the collective intelligence of Dopplr is available to everyone on the web to help them travel smarter.

Of course, this works both ways, and we hope of course that more people find Dopplr this way and choose to participate to make our social atlas more comprehensive.

Here’s an example of our new public tips pages: tips tagged “breakfast” in San Francisco:

From which I can find a hidden gem like the one Yoz suggests:

So that’s the useful stuff, but perhaps the most noticeable, eyecatching thing about the new pages is the inclusion of Creative-Commons-licenced photography of the world’s cities powered by Flickr.

We’ve curated a small collection of CC-attribution-sharealike licenced photos from Flickr Places, and then superimposed a graph of Dopplr traveller activity, added some interesting factoids like where most people travel to and from that city and hey presto!

We’re pleased as punch with them, and especially happy to be able to support the Creative Commons in a small way. Many thanks to our friends there and at Flickr for their assistance in putting this together.

It was fascinating to work through thousands of amazing images to select them for the city pages. We created a small tool internally to help speed up this task, which we’ll write a separate more technical post about later.

We’re far from having an image for everywhere on Earth, but we’ll be adding more every week.

One other interesting side-effect of creating the public city pages was that we had to make public pages for the whole geographical hierarchy of our ’social atlas’.

So, we now have ‘place’ pages for countries and all of the USA’s states.

And, I find these pages fascinating! I’ve not been able to stop clicking around them in the same way that I could pore over an atlas when I was a child. You keep turning up things like this:

And my favourite:

I think Funafuti might be my new favourite place…

What’s yours? Go explore!

The story starts out like this…

We decided we wanted to make some new stickers to give away, especially in time for dConstruct2008 in Brighton. We were trying to figure out what to do and where to get them printed, when Denise from Moo.com suggested that we use Moo stickers, each representing a city – as they reminded her of the blocks that we use in the Dopplr ’sparklogo’.

We thought this was a great idea, especially as we thought we could go one further and actually generate the city stickers directly from our database, to ssatisfy our near-constant obsession with visualising the world of Dopplr.

MattB got to work making a small bit of code that produced the top 78 cities as colour blocks, to a design template I made in Adobe Illustrator and saved as SVG file for him to manipulate.

With help from our friends at Moo, we were able to interface this directly with their API, creating a limited-edition 100 sticker books to give away.

They went down really well at the event, and we’re starting to collect pictures of people stickering their laptops, moleskines and sometimes themselves with physical infovis in a new Dopplr Moo Stickers group on Flickr.

Things took an unexpected and amazing turn this morning, when Denise IM’d me and let me know that someone had left a comment on Moo’s blog, saying that they really liked how the stickers looked and decided to create a little webapp to generate their own: Mooplr!

Just as we had, Mooplr gets the Dopplr API and Moo API to talk to each other to make stickers.

But Kev Lloyd, the man behind Mooplr went further, and created a simple, minimal interface to let you search for whatever cities or towns you want to make stickers for.

It’s moments like this morning that you realise that the rhetoric of “web2.0″ does have some substance to it, when it allows people to easily create wonderful stuff with what you put out there for them to play with.

Thanks Lloydie!

Yesterday I asked what a particular list of English words had in common. Here’s the answer:

Mobile, AL, United States | Page, ND, United States | Nice, France | For, Norway | Name, Mozambique | Union, Philippines | Best, Netherlands | Dollar, United Kingdom | Tours, France | Split, Croatia | Accident, MD, United States | Mile, Tanzania | List, Germany | Central, SC, United States | Deal, NJ, United States | Deposit, NY, United States | Trip, Romania | This, France | Back, United Kingdom | Carry, Haiti | Center, MO, United States | Start, Russia | Kilo, Finland | Purchase, NY, United States | Transfer, PA, United States | Goès, France | Plan, Spain | Media, PA, United States | Sale, Australia | Downtown, PA, United States | Fully, Switzerland | Luck, WI, United States | Normal, IL, United States | Comfort, TX, United States | Call, MO, United States | Local, MO, United States

Every one of these words occurs often in emails sent by the travel industry. And every word is also the name of a place somewhere in the world. Congratulations to commenter Smyles yesterday for guessing most of the connection.

The reason these words are important to us is that they are the “stop” list we use to filter emails before trying to interpret trip information from them. Without this list, we’d see a phrase like “accident insurance” or “for your comfort” and offer you trips to the towns of Accident, For or Comfort.

Congratulations to our friends at Yahoo Brickhouse. This week they’ve launched Fire Eagle, “an open platform that helps users take their location to the Web while giving them the ability to easily control how and where their location data is shared.”

By registering for an account, you can use a variety of websites, phones, devices and services to tell Fire Eagle where you are right now. Naturally Dopplr is one such application. If you enable Fire Eagle on your Dopplr account then we’ll publish a location update to Fire Eagle once a day, just when you’re travelling.

Once Fire Eagle knows where you are, you can authorise other services to access that information and do things for you using it. At Wikinear you can access wikipedia pages chosen based on where you are in the world. outside.in can send you news alerts about what’s happening in your current neighbourhood. You can publish your location in a sidebar on your blog with the Movable Type plugin. And if you change your mind, you have complete control over the level of detail the applications can access, and can revoke the permission at any time.

Because Fire Eagle is an open platform, anyone who wants to code an application can get a developer account and create a new location-aware service without having to worry about whether you’ll be updating it with an iPhone, a laptop or your Dopplr itinerary. We’re big fans of this modular approach and think it’s the next step in the evolution of the web. Dopplr itself uses the services of many 3rd-party applications, whether it’s our Facebook app, our import of trips from Google Calendars or Upcoming events, social network import from LinkedIn or Gmail, or all the places we use Google Maps and Flickr Photos to give you better information on your trips.

As we’ve mentioned before, the Dopplr website assigns a distinct colour to every city in our database. This is all very well, but sometimes it generates a colour that’s a little hard to see against a white background (Stockholm’s colour, for instance, is extremely pale), and I wanted to fix this.

Luckily, the W3C have a draft technique for measuring the contrast between two colours, so now when we generate the city colour we first check it to make sure that it’ll be sufficiently visible against our white background. If it’s not, we darken the colour until the contrast is high enough. This means that we’ll be changing the colours of some cities, but the new city colours will be the same as the old colours, only darker.

Dopplr "badgegeist" Physical Prototype by Jerakeen, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

Tom mocked this up really quickly this morning.

It’s a dynamic version of our logo showing the city colours of where people are on trips to right now. It’s our equivalent of that LED sign that Google used to have on their wall showing current search queries… except a lot slower…

Currently it’s mocked-up using the crystal-case packaging of a Jawbone headset and an iPod Touch that’s connected over wifi to the script that generates the logo.

Here’s a Flickr video (or “long photo”) showing the componentry…

We’re going to try and make a bigger version for our office wall with RGB leds and an arduino as a summer project… Stay tuned!

badgorama, originally uploaded by jerakeen.

As MattB said – it’ll remind people of a certain age (including us) of a ZX Spectrum loading screen…

For Facebook users, here’s something, via MattB, that you can use to plug Dopplr into the social-networking site:

Go here and add the app (when asked, you’ll need to check the box to stay permanently logged in).

You’ll be asked to sign in to Dopplr with your usual login details. This is so we can associate your Dopplr account with your Facebook profile ID.

Now look at your Facebook profile page and you should see the ‘Dopplr’ box. This will update every day with your current location. On days when you’re travelling, we’ll add a news item to your mini-feed telling people where you’re going (or returning) to.

Please keep in mind that we’re still working on this. But do let us know if you have any difficulties. You can also discuss Dopplr on the Facebook group.

Tom Insam has been helping us behind the scenes while we design the future Dopplr API. Using Zimki, a preview release of the API and some javascript code, he’s created a couple of Google Earth dynamic overlays that visualise your trips and the location of your fellow travellers.