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.
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:
Over the summer we’ve been working hard to create Groups on Dopplr.
There will be a few stages to this, and the first we’re ready to introduce is the groups feature for companies and corporations, which we launched at dConstruct08.
Overall – groups are a way to share trips with people who might not be in your Dopplr network yet, but would share a common interest around the trips you place in those groups. Specifically, in this first stage of our roll-out of groups, that common interest equates to the companies we work for.
What do I mean?
Well – imagine the trip as a “social object” you can place into a group for anyone who is a member of that group to see. For instance, say I worked for SuperDuperBigCo, and was going on a business trip to Tokyo.
Everyone in my Dopplr network would see the trip as per usual – but if I chose to place the trip in the SuperDuperBigCo group then anyone in the group could see it, including members of the group who I don’t share trips with currently.
So, coincidences with other SuperDuperBigCo staff who have placed their trips to Toyko in the group would be highlighted to me, even if I don’t yet share trips with that colleague.
Discovering someone else from my company is going to be there might make my trip more productive, more fun – or both!
It might even mean I change my trip to make it more valuable if I was going on company business, or, in some cases it might mean I discover I don’t have to travel at all.
We think that company groups are a pretty powerful tool for optimising travel.
You certainly don’t have to put every trip into a group, for instance, personal trips; but you can opt to make placing a trip into a group or groups your default setting – which might save you time if most of your travel is on company business.
The group ‘home’ has an overview of the individual activity and trips placed with the group, and also has some other interesting features based on the aggregate behaviour of the group.
For instance: group carbon (calculated by aggregating information from those in the group who have declared their carbon profile sharable), a ‘raumzeitgeist’ view of the group’s travels, an upcoming trip activity ’seismograph’ and a historical chart of top destinations of the group.
We’ll be adding more features and data-toys over time. If there’s anything you think would be particularly useful to you as a group, do let us know on our Get Satisfaction Forum.
Here’s a screenshot of our (i.e. Dopplr Ltd’s) group home.
You might have received a message from us over the weekend if you’re registered with Dopplr with an email address belonging to one of the companies we’ve created a group for.
The initial list of companies is below – we’ve based it on the Dopplr100 list that we created last year, but if your company would like a group, let us know.
When you visit the company group page, we’ll ask you to verify you have a valid email address belonging to the company.
Don’t worry if your Dopplr account isn’t registered with that email address – as long as you can receive a validation code at your company email address it’s fine.
We’ve introduced “guest passes” – for the times that you want to send a specific trip to someone whether they’re a member of Dopplr or those not using the service yet (future members, we prefer to call them!)
They’re super-simple to use.
Just click “Share this trip” next to any of your trips…
A “Share this trip” box will pop-up.
In here you can type the name of any Dopplr member you know (we’ll show you a list of your connections)
Or – an email address of someone you want to share the trip with – perhaps a colleague or a family member who’s not on Dopplr yet. Of course you can enter as many email addresses or user-names as you want.
You can even share a trip with a group on Dopplr (more about these soon…)
You can add a short message if you want to give the person or persons you’re going to share the trip with a little bit more context.
Once you’re happy – hit send, and we’ll issue a ‘guest pass’ to the trip in email to non-Dopplr users, like this:
Existing Dopplr users will get an entry in their journal calling attention to the trip you wanted to share.
Click on the ‘guest pass’ URL, and there’s the details of the trip with any notes that have been added to it.
Remember that notes can be seen by any Dopplr user, and anyone you share the trip with. If you want to store more sensitive information with your trip, we’d recommmend you use the private description field.
You’re in control of the guest passes – and can stop sharing the trip with individuals as you choose.
So – that’s a quick tour of our new guest pass feature.
It would be remiss of me not to mention the inspiration we took for the user-experience of this feature from our friends over the road at last.fm, and over the pond at flickr who have nailed this – if we’ve made something 5% as nice as them we’ll be happy.
But, mainly we hope it makes it easier for you to use Dopplr with people not on the service yet, and of course, spreads the word for making the travel smarter with Dopplr.
We’ve added another way to get your trips into your Dopplr. If you check your Calendars and Events account page you’ll now see the option to associate your Dopplr account with your Upcoming account. After you do that, we’ll scan your Upcoming regularly and add trips for any event you’ve marked as Attending — as long as it’s outside your home city.
We’ll remember that the trip came from Upcoming and display a link to the event page wherever we show the trip. You can see this right now on my public profile on my trip to Amsterdam to attend the Picnic conference.
Don’t forget you can also use the same account page to subscribe to internet-connected calendars like Google Calendar, and to push calendars from clients like Apple iCal.
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.”
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.
One of the great things about using copy as interface is how quickly you can change it if you have an idea.
This lunchtime I was looking at my Dopplr journal, and realised we should make it a lot clearer when exactly you and the people in your network are going to be in the same place at the same time.
After all, Dopplr is all about coincidences and maximising serendipity.
Tom said it would be pretty easy to do, MattB agreed and it went live this afternoon!
One of the most-requested things we hear from your feedback is “can you automate how I get my trip information into Dopplr”.
We agree that entering stuff by hand is not great.
Look! I’m doing it right now!
It’s horrible!
However, Dopplr is about your future, which, as far as we know can’t be automated (yet) and if you’re trying to optimise your travel plans before you book stuff, we need to get the information from other places, including plain-old human input.
We try to make every effort to ensure that it’s as painless as possible in the UI to enter your trips, but as always if you have any specific ideas or criticism about that, that would be great.
BUT!
We’re always working on a bunch of ways to get your information into Dopplr easily.
First up we worked on easy ways to get the information into Dopplr from your calendaring software – like Google Calendar and Apple iCal. So that if you’ve entered it once there, you don’t have to enter it again.
AND!
Today I’m really happy to say we’re taking the wraps off a number of new ways to get your future into Dopplr and share your travel information with those you trust: Dopplr by Twitter, SMS and… Email!
First up…
Twitter
You can now add trips easily on Dopplr using a Twitter account.
There’s a special Dopplr ‘robot’ user on Twitter that is there only to receive messages from you, which then get turned into trips on Dopplr.
Once you’ve gone through a simple procedure to associate your Twitter account with your Dopplr username, you’ll be able to start using this feature.
You can send it a message by twittering something like
“D dopplr a trip to Helsinki on May 19th until May 23rd”
or you can also use the “@dopplr” prefix if you don’t mind the details being seen in ‘public’ on twitter.
The only constraint is we ask you to make sure to mention a placename and two dates, including the month both times.
For example:
A trip to Helsinki on May 19 to May 23
At SFO on September 9th. Leaving on September 20th
I’m going to Austin on July 15 for 3 nights
Secondly…
SMS
Similarly to Twitter, you’ll have to go through a simple procedure for us to associate your mobile number with your Dopplr account, but after that you can send SMS messages with a place and a date or range of dates, and Dopplr will do the rest.
And, again, our only constraint is we ask you to make sure to mention a placename and two dates, including the month both times.
Third, and finally…
Email!
Yes – EMAIL! Who-hoo!
*ahem*
Dopplr can interpret messages you send us via email into trips and other details associated with your travels.
Again, You can send us simple messages like:
“I’ll be in San Francisco from August 18th for 4 days”
or you can forward your e-tickets, itineraries or other confirmation emails you’ve received from airlines or hotels.
The latter will create trips on Dopplr, and they’ll be stored as private attachments so you can keep all your travel arrangements in one place.
What’s more, once you’ve made a trip you can send anything you’d like associated with your destination and time you’ll be there – for instance: hotel reservations or car-rental confirmations – and they’ll get attached to it.
The trip becomes like a little inbox for anything you send that we can identify by the same place and date-range.
Just send us messages to trips@dopplr.com from the email address you originally registered with Dopplr and we’ll do the rest.
Behind all of this is an engine we’ve been developing to do what you mean from whatever you send us.
For more on that, here’s MattB with his by-now-traditional ‘science bit’:
There are an awful lot of ways to format a travel itinerary. When people asked us to extract trips from emails, we looked at our long history of e-tickets, confirmations and reservations, and scratched our heads.
Inspiration came in the shape of Apple’s last OS X release, Leopard, and an intriguing feature called “Data detectors“.
We realised that instead of creating a piece of code to decode every email format out there, we could look for patterns of dates and place names in the text (and later, other information too) and turn those into trips.
A happy side-effect of this approach is that as well as extracting information from automatic reservation emails, it works well with short text strings like “I’ll be in San Francisco from 3rd July to 7th July”. This means we can work with many hand-written emails, with Twitters, and with SMSes too.
Of course it won’t work with every variation under the sun (for example, it’s most reliable when an email contains just a return trip in a single hop), but we’ve had very satisfying results in our testing. And of course every email you send us will be added to our test suite so that our engine can get better and better over time.
So – three new ways to tell Dopplr and your network about your plans and optimise your trips. As always, do let us know what you think and how we can improve them.
We’ve got some big plans for the engine in coming months, which hopefully will make it a lot easier for you get the most out of your future travel.
One of the most requested features we’ve had from you all is the ability to extend the sharing of information within Dopplr to the entire internet.
We conceived of Dopplr as a tool for small groups of people to share important information with those they trust, but we always thought there would be a public component if we could do it right without compromising that core of the service.
And, for better or worse, we though it prudent to take slow steps towards this, as we knew we couldn’t get the toothpaste back in the tube if we got it wrong.
Today, we think we’ve got there, and we’re pleased to announce the first version of our public profile feature for our “Copenhagen” release.
The public profile feature allows you complete control over what you display to the rest of the internet outside of Dopplr, or whether indeed you do so at all – you can hide your profile from the internet at any time, and prevent search engines from finding it.
It’s completely modular – meaning not only can you switch on and off the panels of information you want, but you can also embed any individual panel as a widget in your own website or send it as a link in email or IM.
As well as being able to show your past and planned trips, illustrated with maps and photos – you can publish your tips about your favourite places around the world.
A lot of people tell me that although they don’t travel a lot, they love hosting friends who do in their home cities, and want to share their tips more freely – so this is one of the first steps in making Dopplr more satisfying for them.
We’ve also, as you might expect from us, added some “data toys” for you to play with and display on your profiles. We’re hoping to add more toys from ourselves and ‘guest toymakers’ in the near future.
Personal Velocity works out your average speed through the world in the past twelve months, and then, naturally (!), compares that to the nearest speed in the animal kingdom.
If there any zoologists out there, we look forward to you correcting our estimates…
There are also a couple of (very cool) surprises in there for those of you who aren’t tearing round the planet like cheetahs, antelope or whippets…
But – like our “Your Carbon” feature – this isn’t meant to be a competition or a judgement, but offered up as something it might be fun (or terrifying!) to reflect upon, and start conversations. Perfect for a public profile we thought.
Here’s a quick screencast of me creating and publishing my public profile that shows how easy and flexible it is.
Looking forward to seeing your profiles on the internets, and as per usual, hearing any feedback and comments you have here or over on our Get Satisfaction forum.
How does Dopplr know which city you mean when you type in your destination? It looks up the name in a database, and tries to find a match. We have information on over 150,000 world cities but several travellers have asked for better coverage. So we’ve been doing some work behind the scenes to improve it.
It’s difficult to get the location right every time, for lots of reasons; partly because the same place name might be spelt differently in different languages; partly because there are many places that share the same name.
We call our database “the gazetteer”. We’ve been adding new technology to make it work smarter, including data from a free service called Geonames. Geonames makes this possible by kindly licensing their data using a Creative Commons license.
Our aim is to add all the cities Geonames knows to our gazetteer. We’re adding 100,000 new cities every day, and will keep doing so until we’ve got information on 2.4 million places around the globe.
We’re also including destinations that aren’t cities – things like islands, national parks, and ski resorts. So in future, Dopplr is more likely to recognise names of places you’re travelling to. We’ve made other changes to the gazetteer too, tweaks to the way it guesses which destination you mean when lots of locations share the same name.
Finally, we’re now taking a nightly data feed from Geonames, which means that newly added or edited cities will also be incorporated into our database. So if there’s a place you care about that isn’t in Dopplr, you could help us and the whole Geonames community by going to Geonames and contributing the information.
This smarter, faster gazetteer will hopefully make Dopplr easier to use. Please contact us if you have any questions about it.
As I mentioned in the previous post, a lot of you have been asking for the ability to add ‘multi-stop’ trips, that is – trips where you’ll be hitting a number of destinations before you return home.
We’ve added this now, with a tweak to our ‘Add trip’ interface that I’ll illustrate below.
So, first of all – after clicking ‘add a trip’ on Dopplr, you see our new, slightly-tweaked ‘Add trip’ form:
You’ll notice that there’s a new link beneath the date field for the start of the trip – “Add another stop on this trip”
Clicking that does what it says on the tin, and gives you another destination field to put the next stop on your trip into.
You can click the “X” by the side of this new line of destination and starting date to get rid of it if you’ve added one-too-many stops in your excitement!
The more eagle-eyed amongst you will have already spotted that the dates advance on automatically by a day every stop you add to the trip. Of course you can manually alter these to reflect your itinerary.
If you enter a date by accident that is out of order, we’ll ask you to check and replace it with a date the same as or after the date of your previous stop.
Once you’re happy with the shape of your multi-stop trip, add it to Dopplr in the normal way by clicking “Add trip” – we’ll generate trip pages for each of the stops on your trip, but they will be connected together as ‘related trips’.
We’ll be adding more special formatting and functionality related to ‘related trips’ (!) in the near future.
She’s travelling the world, and along with a bunch of other social tools, she’s using Dopplr to find coincidences with fellow travellers along the way. If you’re a Dopplr member you can find her at http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/skypenomad
Right – enough tasty sprinkles for now. Time for me to get back to plotting the next lot of goodness for you lovely people with MattB…
Remember, in the mean-time, if you’ve got thoughts on new stuff you’d like to see on Dopplr, or feedback for how we could improve it for you, zoom along to our forum on Get Satisfaction…
—– Update, 22nd May 2008: We’ve had some feedback that Multi-stop trips are not displaying on Microsoft IE6 – this is unfortunately true.
After a lot of blood,sweat and tears we haven’t found a satisfactory way of implementing them on IE6, so we took the decision to disable the feature in that browser. I’m sure this is frustrating to many of you – it’s certainly very frustrating for us.
We realise lots of you don’t have the choice to change browser or upgrade, and as a result are stuck with IE6, so we’re going to do what we can to find a work-around for you – MJ
![[Dopplr] Matt Jones shared a trip with you](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3035/2859336592_b2d4a0299d_o.png)
