Every one of these words occurs often in emails sent by the travel industry. And every word is also the name of a place somewhere in the world. Congratulations to commenter Smyles yesterday for guessing most of the connection.
The reason these words are important to us is that they are the “stop” list we use to filter emails before trying to interpret trip information from them. Without this list, we’d see a phrase like “accident insurance” or “for your comfort” and offer you trips to the towns of Accident, For or Comfort.
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.
As we’ve mentioned before, the Dopplr website assigns a distinct colour to every city in our database. This is all very well, but sometimes it generates a colour that’s a little hard to see against a white background (Stockholm’s colour, for instance, is extremely pale), and I wanted to fix this.
Luckily, the W3C have a draft technique for measuring the contrast between two colours, so now when we generate the city colour we first check it to make sure that it’ll be sufficiently visible against our white background. If it’s not, we darken the colour until the contrast is high enough. This means that we’ll be changing the colours of some cities, but the new city colours will be the same as the old colours, only darker.
It’s a dynamic version of our logo showing the city colours of where people are on trips to right now. It’s our equivalent of that LED sign that Google used to have on their wall showing current search queries… except a lot slower…
Currently it’s mocked-up using the crystal-case packaging of a Jawbone headset and an iPod Touch that’s connected over wifi to the script that generates the logo.
Here’s a Flickr video (or “long photo”) showing the componentry…
We’re going to try and make a bigger version for our office wall with RGB leds and an arduino as a summer project… Stay tuned!
For Facebook users, here’s something, via MattB, that you can use to plug Dopplr into the social-networking site:
Go here and add the app (when asked, you’ll need to check the box to stay permanently logged in).
You’ll be asked to sign in to Dopplr with your usual login details. This is so we can associate your Dopplr account with your Facebook profile ID.
Now look at your Facebook profile page and you should see the ‘Dopplr’ box. This will update every day with your current location. On days when you’re travelling, we’ll add a news item to your mini-feed telling people where you’re going (or returning) to.
Please keep in mind that we’re still working on this. But do let us know if you have any difficulties. You can also discuss Dopplr on the Facebook group.
Tom Insam has been helping us behind the scenes while we design the future Dopplr API. Using Zimki, a preview release of the API and some javascript code, he’s created a couple of Google Earth dynamic overlays that visualise your trips and the location of your fellow travellers.
