At Dopplr we’re big fans of giving you your information anywhere you want it. Our philosophy is that you shouldn’t have to visit dopplr.com to get the benefits of membership. In the future this is going to mean a mobile-friendly stripped-down XHTML site, more interaction over SMS and integration with platforms like Twitter. For now, it mostly means feeds.

So far, most of the personal Atom and calendar feeds on Dopplr have used HTTP Basic Authentication to protect access. It turns out that even in 2007 there are some important newsreader applications that don’t support this scheme, and this has been causing problems for people.

Today we changed the feed URLs to use ‘obscure’ tokens as a privacy scheme. This means you’ll no longer need to enter a password to access a feed because each URL is personalised to you with an unguessable token like 53adfbc52bffabefd44cdf0a7383247040dbd99eb65a07365952059dc3849c95. Of course, because the URL is all you need to read your information, you should take care not to reveal it in public or share it with anyone you don’t trust.

We haven’t disabled the original scheme; if you’ve already subscribed to a feed and it’s working for you then it should continue to work. However, any new feed URL that you get from the site will work in the new way.

The one exception to this is personal iCal feeds. If you’re reading your itinerary through a calendar application then it’ll have a URL like http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/mattb/ical. This will no longer work and you’ll need to visit your account page and get a new URL. I’m sorry about that.

As always, if you have problems then don’t hesitate to get in touch by sending feedback through the site.