We’re happy to announce that we’ve just added a feature that is among the most requested by all of you: subscribing to your online calendar and adding trips from it into Dopplr automatically.

Today we’ll explain how to use Google Calendar with Dopplr – although this feature works with any calendar that can publish an iCalendar feed to the web. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to do it.

First, create a new calendar. We suggest calling “My Travel” or some such thing, but of course that is up to you. When you create it, do not make it a public calendar unless you want the whole world to be able to find it via Google search.

Now, in your new Google Calendar, create an event as we show below. Set the dates in the “When” fields. Be sure to put the location in the “Where” field (that’s the most reliable way to tell Dopplr what your destination is, although we’ll also scan the title and description for place names if we don’t see a location).

IMPORTANT: To help ensure that Dopplr understands your actual destination in the Where field, please make sure the city name goes first, not after a street address. For example, “San Francisco, 21 Streetname” will work, whereas “21 Streetname, San Francisco” will unfortunately confuse Dopplr. Also, if you’re using a common city name — such as Cambridge — you’ll get better results by giving more information, e.g. “Cambridge, MA” (Massachusetts in the United States) or “Cambridge, United Kingdom”. Dopplr is smart but can’t read your mind; we’re working on ways to make this process easier for you.

Once you’ve finished entering your information about the trip, click the Save button.

Below, you’ll see the event in your calendar.

Now, under “My Calendars” (below left), click the down-arrow link next to “My travel” (or whatever you called your travel calendar). You’ll see this:

Click “Calendar Settings” and look at the “Calendar Details” tab in this screen:

At the bottom of that screen…

… click the ICAL button next to Private Address: — this is very important if you want to keep your travel plans private to yourself and your trusted Dopplr travellers — and you’ll get a pop-up that looks something like this:

Copy that URL into your clipboard. Now go to your Dopplr page and click on “Your account” (at the top of your page). Then click “Import trips from external calendars” and you’ll see this:

Paste in the URL you copied from your new Google calendar. Dopplr will look at that calendar, and let you know if it’s found some trips. In this case it found the Amsterdam trip created in our example. Click “Subscribe to calendar”.

And automagically it’ll appear on your Dopplr calendar. That’s it. Now when you update your Google calendar, Dopplr will discover the changes and reflect them on your Dopplr page. There will be a note of it in your journal and in your email alerts.

Note: If you change something in Dopplr you’ll break the link between the external calendar event — but not the entire calendar, whew — and Dopplr. (Trips you create in Dopplr won’t affect the Google calendar, however, or break the connection.) If that’s a concern, you may want to do all of your updating of trips from the Google Calendar.

Coming soon: Apple iCal to Dopplr.

If you’ve updated your iphone/ipodtouch this week and can use the new ‘webclip’ feature, then go to http://m.dopplr.com and add Dopplr as a webclip to your homescreen. You’ll get a shiny little Dopplr logo and fast access to the service on the go.

We’ve just turned on a cool feature that many of you have requested: an easy way to act on trip coincidences — email from individual trip pages.

Go to any of your trip pages (it’s the “More details on this trip” link in the list of your upcoming places). Then look under Coincidences, on the right side of the page.

Assuming one or more of your fellow travellers either lives there or is going to be there at the same time, you’ll see another link that says “Sent them an email?” Click that, and we take you to a form that lets you check boxes next to the people to whom you want to send messages, with a box containing the text that you’ll then compose.

There’s a detailed explanation on that page as well, regarding message privacy and other things.

We’ll be upgrading this feature soon, with (for example) a way to change the subject line to something you choose instead of the generic ” A message about my trip to [city name]” –

Let us know how it works for you.

UPDATE: A new and shorter tour is now available.

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:
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The folks at Mahalo have created a nifty “How to Use Dopplr” page — better than the one I was working on, ahem…

There’s also a video here at Blip.TV; we emphasize that the video is tongue-in-cheek, that is, not entirely serious — actually not remotely serious. But it’s hilarious. (Caution: the default is to run when you open it; so if you’re in an office be aware that music will play.)

Thanks, Mahalo!

As a North American I’ve been slightly vexed by one of our settings that reflects Dopplr’s European heritage. This is the popup calendar when creating or editing a trip that showed a Monday to Sunday week. I’m used to seeing the calendar as Sunday through Saturday.

MattB and team have come up with a nifty interim fix. They’ve installed a calendar that uses your home location to decide. North Americans get Sunday to Saturday weeks, and the rest of the world gets Monday to Sunday. So my edit-trip calendar looks like this:

Again, this is just an interim step. You’ll soon be able to make this decision for yourself in the “Your account” settings.

In case you haven’t looked at the Dopplr FAQ, here are some of the user tips you may have missed:

How do I add trips?
Click on “Add a Trip” (upper right on your home page). Then fill out the form and you’re off! You can also click on a city name and add a trip from there.

How do I invite people to see my travels?
Click on “Invite” at the top of the page—then fill in the form. (From time to time we may close off further invitations in order to keep the site running smoothly while we build its capabilities.)

How do I find out which friends and colleagues are using Dopplr?
Type a name of someone into the search box. Try just the first name if you want; we’ll show you everyone by that name who’s using the site. When you click on a name, you’ll be invited to make that person a “fellow traveller” who can see your trips. You can also browse the icons below the trips of people who have let you see their schedules. Click on their names, and if you’re not already sharing your trips with them you’ll be able to start.

How do I see trips of people I know?
This is entirely opt-in, but from one direction only. So they have to invite you. But even if someone else doesn’t invite you to see their travels, you’re free to invite them to see yours.

How can I un-invite people?
You can’t remove them from the service, but you can stop sharing your trips with them. Go to “Manage connections” at the top of the page and select the “Who can see your trips” tab. Then click on “Stop sharing” and they’ll stop seeing your trips. (They will not be notified—your trips will simply stop appearing on their list of travellers.)

Can I do this with more than one person at a time?
Yes. There’s a check-box next to every traveller’s name, and a pull-down menu at the bottom that lets you perform the same action on the people you select.

How can I stop seeing someone else’s trips temporarily?
Go to “Manage connections” at the top of the page and select the “Whose trips you can see” tab. Then click on “Mute” and you’ll stop seeing their trips. (They will not be notified—their trips will simply stop appearing on your list of travellers.)

Can I do this with more than one person at a time?
Yes. There’s a check-box next to every traveller’s name, and a pull-down menu at the bottom that lets you perform the same action on the people you select.

Several people have let me see their trips, but am I required to share mine with them?
No, you’re not obliged to share your trips with anyone. Of course, at some point they may decide to stop sharing their trips with you.

How can I know when my friends are visiting my town?
Click on your home city from your home page. Dopplr will tell you which of your travellers are visiting, and will also note when if you’ll be away during the entire time that one or more of them are going to around.

How do I change my home city?
Type the name of a place into the text-entry rectangle near the top of the page, and see if the city is listed. If it is, click on it. You’ll see a link that says “Change your home city to {whatever you’ve selected}” — click that, then click the confirmation button {”Yes”} and your home city will be changed.

Where does the data go? Who controls it?
We intend to have policies that are protective of your privacy, and are working on them now. If you don’t like what the policy says when we post it, we promise to delete every scrap of information about you from our server. (We can’t control what your friends may have written down, of course. But then again, they’re your friends, right?)

I’ve just tested the iCal export (from Dopplr) as an import into Microsoft Outlook on Windows. It works, at least on the latest (2007) version of Outlook, which I’m running on Windows XP inside a virtual machine on my Mac (thank you, thank you, Apple, for moving to the Intel architecture).

The full instructions are in an update to this previous posting.

If you have an earlier version of Outlook, please let us know if this works on that as well.

This also works with Evolution on Linux, and I would assume it also works with Mozilla Thunderbird on various platforms.

This week, after a dinner conversation with Stowe Boyd, I’ve been adding new features to our Atom feeds.

From your Account page, you’ll now find a link to a feed that just contains your trips (optionally with past trips included too). Why would you want this? Because the feed contains a lot of machine-readable information. Here are some ways to use it:

Put your itinerary on your blog sidebar

Most modern blog systems will take an Atom feed URL and import the entries as a sidebar on your blog:

Map it in Google Maps

Google Maps understands the GeoRSS entries in the feed. Here’s all the trips I’ve shared since Dopplr began in early 2007:

View Larger Map

Export from NetNewsWire to iCal

Just like the main Dopplr site, the new feed uses the hCalendar microformat which some feedreaders can use to import trip details into calendar software. Here’s a screenshot of NetNewsWire importing a trip into Apple iCal:

Use your Javascript, your Yahoo Pipes and your imagination

The examples above are just a few suggestions I came up with this afternoon, and I didn’t even mention the Google Data-compatible event data. With a bit of extra work, I’m sure you’ll come up with something much more interesting.

Remember that the URL for your trip feed is personal to you – it’s got a code on it that no one will be able to guess. So think carefully if you’re going to embed that URL in a public widget (like I’ve done with mine in the Google Map above). Once someone has the URL, they’ll be able to follow your trips through that feed, even if they’re not a Dopplr member. Personally I don’t mind if my trips are visible in public, but you might feel differently. Code carefully.

One of the most urgent requests we’ve had is about data-entry: We don’t want to have to enter our trip information more than once on our computers.

We’re working on making this a smooth, even seamless process across several popular calendars — and it’s dead easy on one (Mac iCal) right now, as you’ll see below, and relatively easy on Microsoft Outlook if you use Windows (and you can use basically the same technique for Evolution on Linux). We’ll also show you a somewhat more cumbersome way to connect to Google Calendar. Details:

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