While we generally release a new version of the service fairly regularly, there’s always something that’s ready-to-rock; and just this week we’ve put live a number of improvements and new features that we’ve been working on beside some of the major new stuff that’s coming soon.

First up, there’s now the ability to add a ‘multi-hop’ trip - something that a lot of you have been asking for. More on that in a separate post.

Secondly - we’ve made some improvements to our tools to manage how you share information with people.

Celia, our community design manager took the lead on that one, incorporating your feedback and our drive to try make everything as simple, elegant and clear as we can.

Over to Celia for her take on the process:

“Redesigning the ‘Connections’ pages was my first design task at
Dopplr. It seemed daunting at first but turned out to be a lot of fun.

We knew that the existing pages were too complicated and that we could
make them better. But instead of relying on our own sense of what
could be improved, we asked our travellers to tell us what they
thought. So we posted a question up on Get Satisfaction and got lots
of fantastic responses - it was really exciting to watch them come in.
A huge thank you goes to everyone who helped us out.

We didn’t incorporate all the ideas there into this version of the
design - there’s always a process of pick and choose that you go
through when coming up with a coherent scheme. The things that didn’t
make it this time round are definitely on file for future reference,
though.

After taking in people’s comments, the next step was to sit down and
digest it and come up with some sketches. The main aim was to keep the
pages as clear as possible - they show lots of different kinds of
relationships and the goal was to make it really easy to see what was
what.

The main changes you’ll notice are that we’ve condensed four tabs down
into just two, and made the titles of the sections within each tab as
explanatory as possible. Hopefully the new version makes it easier to
see who’s who in your Dopplr network.”

Lastly, we’ve given various things like our page headings a spring-clean to make search and other functions easier to find.

We’ve also redesigned our city pages.

This one makes me very happy - I think the guys did a beautiful job on them.

Over to Boris for some colour-commentary on that:

“While adjusting a few things here and there to better fit our not-so-incredibly-tight grid layout (mea culpa!), I was recoding the block that holds the Google Map on the individual trip screens. In so doing, it stretched out to 100% over on the Place screens. While in this state it clearly broke everything around it, I immediately thought “my, that’s pretty…”

A bit more sculpting, a few discussions with the team and it was agreed that it was pretty… and promptly forgotten for about 5 weeks (haha).

We added it to the to-do list maybe two weeks ago - and in a blaze of activity, Tom pulled in the incoming future-trip parabolics, fixed a map-centering issue and made beautiful colour-coded custom place-name markers et voilà.

We can haz new Place screen headers with better communicating maps! Yatta! Please to enjoy!”

This is one of the reasons I love working on Dopplr as a designer - that we’re able to work with our users on improving things, and also those wonderful moments where you accidentally discover a better way to do something by breaking it… Serendipity!

We’ve launched a new partnership to help you find and book excellent lodging during your travels. We’re working with the boutique hotel experts at Mr & Mrs Smith, and you’ll now have direct access from your Dopplr itineraries to their unrivalled insider knowledge, global hotel collection and booking services.

If you’re familiar with Mr & Mrs Smith, you know that they’re known for deep research into high-quality accommodation. They offer the best room rates on everything from quirky city stays and romantic boutique retreats to stylish country manors and luxury spa hotels. And they tried every place they recommend, to be sure it meets their standard.

Here’s a quick screencast that shows you what you can expect to see when you add a trip to a city covered by Mr & Mrs Smith:

And thanks to TechCrunch UK for their kind words: “It looks like it’ll be right up the Dopplrati’s street”

Everyone hates to enter data twice. A few weeks ago we added a feature that lets you update Dopplr from a Google calendar. Now we’re happy to help you update Dopplr via your Apple Macintosh desktop iCal calendar. Here’s how:

In your iCal calendar, create a new calendar and name it something such as “Travel” or “Dopplr travel” or whatever you like:

Now create a new event in that calendar:

Double click (or click Command-I) the event that now shows up in your calendar and fill in the appropriate information:

This part is important to get right. It helps a great deal if you enter the location information precisely, or Dopplr may guess wrong and create the wrong location on the Dopplr site (which would be bad for serendipity with your trusted friends and colleagues). Remember that Dopplr works with the place names of cities and towns, so make sure you don’t put in a full street address or other details.

In the example above, we’ve created a marketing meeting on June 2-4, 2008, in the windy city of Chicago, which is in Illinois in the U.S. Notice that we wrote “Chicago, IL, United States” — not because Dopplr would be likely to get that particular city wrong but rather to illustrate how we recommend you enter the place name. (If you enter a simple city name and we get it wrong in Dopplr, don’t worry — you can fix it, and we’ll tell you how below.)

Also in this example, we’ve put in a note, “Make sure ad rep is there” as a reminder to ourselves. It and the title of the event “Marketing meeting” will be published on Dopplr, but only in your private trip notes there. In other words, nothing you create in your personal calendar — apart from the dates and places — will be viewable by your Dopplr fellow travellers.

OK, click “Done” and the trip will show up in your calendar. Then go to the menu and select Calendar-Publish:

You’ll see the box below. Select “Publish on: a Private Server” from the pull-down item.

Of the options in Publish calendar, Dopplr cares only about one: “Publish titles and notes.” While you may have selected the others, and may well use them in your desktop calendar, they won’t have any effect in Dopplr. You may also want to check “Publish changes automatically” so you won’t forget to update; the only disadvantage is that Dopplr may first record a trip to “New Event” before you finish entering the details, but that’s ok, because when you do finish it’ll update.

When you select “a Private Server” you’ll see this input box:

OK, now go to your Dopplr page and be sure you’re logged into your account. Click on “Your account” at the top and then on “Import trips from external calendars” on the page where we have various account settings. (direct link)

Near the end of that page you’ll see a paragraph that says:

Alternatively, you can publish a calendar from iCal to the following private server URL (no username or password required):
https://www.dopplr.com/upload/[and a long set of letters and numbers]…./

Copy that link into the Private Server address in the iCal form (we smudged the url but you get the idea):

Apple insists on a username and password. Make something up; you don’t need to put in your Dopplr username/password, as we don’t require it for this step. But you do need to type in something.

Click “Publish” and you’re done. You’ll see a note before you get back to iCal telling you how to let people know if you want them to be able to subscribe to this calendar outside of Dopplr (though we confess we’re not sure why you’d want to do that).

Now you’re set. In iCal, make sure to “Refresh” the exported calendar — right-click on the travel calendar you’re exporting and choose “Refresh” to update our server. (Remember, you can also tell iCal to “Publish changes automatically”.)

Now go back to your Dopplr page. Voila, the trip(s) should be there, as below:

When you click “More details on this trip” you find, in the private note — not the one seen by fellow travellers — the notes you put into iCal when you created the trip. You can still add a note for them to see in the “Add note” box at the bottom of the trip page.

Important: We strongly recommend that you edit trip dates and places only in iCal (or other external calendar). If you edit in Dopplr you’ll break the link back to the external calendar, and there’s nothing we can do to fix that.

If Dopplr does bring in the wrong place name, we recommend that you fix it this way:

Click the “Edit this trip” link (on the right in the above image). Let’s imagine we really intended to go to a different Chicago (and had put it in the original iCal trip as just “Chicago,” which Dopplr would interpret to be the big Illinois city as the most likely candidate. Type “Chicago” (without the quotes) in the Destination: field and wait a couple of seconds. You’ll see some activity followed by this screen:

This invites you to see other places called Chicago, and gives you a link to click to see them. Click it and you’ll see this:

Copy the name of the city you actually intended — in this case we’ll choose Chicago Heights, IL, United States — into your clipboard. Copy just the text, not the hyperlink. Now — very very important — cancel your edit. Do not click the “Done” button.

Next, go back to iCal and paste in the correct city name. Like this:

Click “Done” and the iCal trip event will be updated. So will Dopplr:

We wish we could make this part easier. But iCal and other external calendars tend to publish in one direction only.

Let us know how it works for you. We’ll be adding tweaks and fixes.

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.

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:

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.

As we mentioned earlier, we’ve been working hard to improve the Trip and Journal pages.

You can now add pictures to trips; find out who in your network is likely to have the most amount of expertise about that destination (based on frequency of visits there); and see “sparklines” and other visualisations of the information.

You can also add private notes on trips and see who lives in your trip destination. Pictures can be added from Flickr, and we have a Facebook connection.

The Journal, your record of activity on Dopplr, is now much more detailed and includes a calendar widget to help you look at your past trips. You can also access others’ journals if they share their trips with you. There’s also a web feed that you can subscribe to for automated updates.

Dopplr now gives you email alerts about coincidences in your trusted network. If somebody is coming to your town, or happens to be travelling where you are, you will get an alert in your inbox. You can change your email alert settings on this page.

As MattB notes in a comment in another posting, we just upgraded the way we handle time zones. Your location is calculated just after midnight in your current location rather than midnight GMT, as was previously the case.

What does this mean? Basically this: Travellers in California will no longer have their departures announced 8 hours early.