A major design goal of Dopplr has been simplicity: We believe you should be able to use the site with almost no special help other than what’s in front of you on each page.

That said, we’d like to introduce a “Dopplr Tour” page that we hope will highlight some key features for longstanding Dopplr travellers as well as new ones. If you are new to Dopplr you can sign-up here.

Please take a look. Let us know how we can make it better. Like the service itself, we’ll be improving the tour as time goes on.

Meanwhile, here we go:
Continue reading…

In our bursting-at-the-seams London office, some Dopplr people. From the top left, clockwise, are Tom Insam, Matt Biddulph, Matt Jones and Boris Anthony.

We are thrilled to see that in this New York Times Q&A, WIkipedia founder Jimmy Wales cites his “Favorite non-Wiki Web-site”:

An invitation-only travel site called Dopplr.com. You put in your travel schedule and link to your friends. It allows you to see where everyone is. I love it.

We’re pretty fond of Wikipedia, too…

As well as writing a great Dopplr How-To, as Dan has already mentioned, the Maholo crew created an infomercial for us!

I think now that we have become worthy of parody, we can say we’ve arrived. I’m definitely going to be taking style tips for my Movember facial hairstyle from our new fictional founder - Don Dopplr Jnr…

At the recent Future of Web Apps event in London, Erika Hall of Mule Design gave a presentation entitled “Copy is interface“, (for which Suw Charman took excellent notes) where we were pleased-as-punch to see Dopplr feature as an example.

As Erika states, using language as interface is particularly powerful if you’re taking that interface across a number of different contexts, e.g. website, RSS feeds, mobile etc.

It’s also great for doing all of the traditional things that copywriting is used for - establishing a posture or voice for the service and communicating that consistently.

However, if you’re…

1. dealing with events in the future, the present and the past
2. primarily using the English language to do so
3. trying to get, y’know, computers to do both

…it can be quite a challenge, but as Erika says, it’s a very worthwhile one!

We get asked a lot about the colour-coding we give to places in Dopplr: what it represents, why we did it, how are the colours assigned.

One of the main ‘atoms’ of Dopplr is unsurprisingly, place - so to make that run through the warp-and-weft of the user-interface, and our branding, was extremely important.

The Dopplr logo, (or ‘SparkLogo’* as we sometimes like to call it) is the clearest example of this perhaps.

As you add trips to different destinations, Dopplr’s logo becomes your logo, reflecting what you’re doing - right the way through to the ‘favicon‘ that shows up in the address field of most browsers.

It also makes for a great blog badge…

As well as the aesthetic delights we believe that city colours bring to the service, we’re using them as visual ‘affordances‘ - ways to create implicit meaning and usefulness in the user-interface.

When you look at a list of your fellow travellers, you’ll see a coloured border around their icon, which correlates to their current location - allowing you to spot coincidences visually.

We’re going to be doing far more with the city colours to create affordances in the near-future… But how do we generate them? What’s the basis for making London a fine electric cyan, or San Francisco a rather-fetching coral pink?

For that I transfer you across to The Other Matt.

Here comes the science bit!

We wanted a deterministic RGB colour value for each city. At first, we tried mapping the latitude and longitude of a city to a point in colour space, but we found that this made neighbouring cities too similar in colour. This means that people who travel frequently between Glasgow and Edinburgh wouldn’t clearly see the difference in colour between the two. Also, since so much of the Earth’s surface is covered in water rather than cities, it leads to a sparse use of the potential colour space. In the end, we went with a much simpler approach: we take the MD5 digest of the city’s name, convert it to hex and take the first 6 characters as a CSS RGB value.

So there you have it. When we struck upon the idea of doing this a couple of weeks into developing Dopplr, it was a huge source of delight to us, and we hope it is to you too…

Illustration: Work-in-progress by Stamen’s Tom Carden using the Dopplr API

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* We call it a ‘SparkLogo’ as tribute to information-design-guru Edward Tufte’s concept of “Sparklines” which we also use as a device for visualising information elsewhere on the service e.g. on the detailed trip pages.

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.

Over at Blip.TV, Matt Dickman offers a First//Look) of Dopplr. He calls it “(g)reat for groups of friends and family trying to track each other’s travel.”

We agree, of course…

OK, “featured” is a bit strong, but we somehow found ourselves in the giant video at yesterday’s Nokia: Go Play media event, where the company launched a number of new initiatives including its Ovi mobile gateway. Dopplr was one of a small group of Web companies listed in a “crawl” on the screen in back of Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s executive vice president and general manager for multimedia, during his keynote speech.

You can see us, in a somewhat blurry way, by clicking on the thumbnail image at left to get a full-sized screenshot from the video webcast (Real Player). (If you’re interested in what Nokia is up to in a general way, and it’s pretty impressive, there’s a lot to see in the webcast.)

Needless to say, we’re delighted to be there alongside companies like YouTube, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and LinkedIn, among others (not, of course, that we’re comparing ourselves to any of them). But being on the screen was, in a real way, a validation of what we’re trying to do here.

Satisfaction, which calls itself “People Powered Customer Service,” offers conversations about products and services. We’ve joined the Dopplr conversation at the site, and will keep track of issues you bring to our attention there.

Let us know if this is helpful.