The Dopplr website will be unavailable for a short time today while our ISP upgrades our network. The maintenance starts at 4pm London time and will last for less than an hour if everything goes smoothly.

As part of our New York release this week, we’ve launched an important new set of features on Dopplr that we’re calling the Social Atlas.

The first part of it lets you build a record of places you’ve been in your home city and cities around the world, like quality restaurants and hotels – as well as other things you’ve explored.

The idea is that our collective travel knowledge will inform and improve the travel experience of all. Any places you’ve marked will be visible to the people that can see your travels on Dopplr.

In addition, your choices will be aggregated, anonymised and visualised into part of a unique overall picture of a city visible to all Dopplr users.

We’ve tried to make the process of marking places as easy as possible. Wherever you see a place you can click on the green “+” next to it to say you’ve been there. Click a second time to say you’ve been there and liked it. If you want to undo all of this, just click a third time.

Eventually the Social Atlas will be on mobile devices, part of a Dopplr mobile application which we’ll be launching very soon.

Here are some pages where you can start finding places you may know:

• Beijing: places to eat and places to stay
• Rome: places to eat and places to stay
• London: places to eat and places to stay
• New York: places to eat and places to stay
• Paris: places to eat and places to stay
• Helsinki: places to eat and places to stay
• San Francisco: places to eat and places to stay
• Barcelona: places to eat and places to stay
• Amsterdam: places to eat and places to stay
• Hong Kong: places to eat and places to stay

You can see all of the places you’ve marked.

Where else can you find places you’ve been?

On a city page – say London, New York, or Paris – look for the tabs eat, stay and explore.

You can search for a place such as: ‘Buddha bar Paris’

For the time being you can only mark places listed on Dopplr, but we will soon allow you to add places to the Dopplr directory. Currently our directory covers over 200 main cities, but we want this to grow. We realise this is an important part of keeping the Social Atlas we’re building fresh and relevant.

These features are still very much in development so please let us know of any feedback or ideas for how we can improve them. Thank you for your help.

We’ve made dedicated shortlinks for key cities around the world so it’s easy to refer to them in tweets, emails and status updates. For major cities just use the city name after http://dplr.it/ and use “-” instead of a space in the name.

Try, for example:
http://dplr.it/london
http://dplr.it/new-york
http://dplr.it/helsinki
http://dplr.it/san-francisco
http://dplr.it/paris
http://dplr.it/sydney
http://dplr.it/madrid
http://dplr.it/amsterdam

Similarly, places to eat and stay in cities have shortlinks. See, for example http://dplr.it/eat/r8i0 and http://dplr.it/stay/kxh0 in London.

It is our goal to make it easier for you to use Dopplr wherever you want. While we mentioned Twitter briefly in our recent Dopplr update, we wanted to say some more about how you can use Twitter and Dopplr together.

You can add trips easily on Dopplr using a Twitter account

There’s a special Dopplr user on Twitter that is there only to receive messages from you, which then get turned into trips on Dopplr. To use this feature you’ll need to first tell Dopplr your Twitter account. Then, 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.

What to say

Start your message with “d dopplr” (to send it in private) or “@dopplr” (so it appears in your Twitter timeline). Make sure to mention a placename and two dates, including the month both times. Use one of these three forms of text to be sure we can understand you:

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

Your Twitter contacts on Dopplr

You can easily check if your Twitter contacts are on Dopplr so that you can share trips with them.

Lastly, remember that the special Dopplr user on Twitter is just a bot. If you want to hear about new developments on Dopplr and the Dopplr team, follow @dopplrhq.

While creating the Personal Annual Report 2008 we uncovered some lovely patterns and information that make building Dopplr worthwhile. For instance we found over 250,000 possible coincidences between fellow travellers last year. That’s a quarter of a million potential dinners we could have made possible!

A lot has happened over the past few months at Dopplr HQ and there’s much more in store. We want you to know what’s happening at our company and where Dopplr is going next. Here are the highlights. You can also follow DopplrHQ on twitter.

More data back to you: The Personal Annual Report

Encouraged by the overwhelming positive feedback on the Personal Annual Report 2008 we sent out, we’re working on more ways to regularly give you back your travel data in useful and beautiful ways. If you have ideas on what data would be most useful to you please let us know.

More ways to use Dopplr via Twitter, email and other social networks

It is our goal to make it easier for you to use Dopplr wherever you want. You can already add trips to Dopplr via Twitter and email without having to visit the site. While there’s lots more to come, we’ve made shortlinks for key cities around the world so it’s easier to refer to cities in tweets, emails and status updates. Try out, for example http://dplr.it/london, http://dplr.it/helsinki, http://dplr.it/san-francisco, http://dplr.it/paris, http://dplr.it/tokyo, http://dplr.it/sydney, http://dplr.it/madrid and http://dplr.it/amsterdam

More ways to mark the past – the social atlas

One of the most frequent requests we’ve had from Dopplr travellers is for more ways to browse and annotate past trips, in particular ways to record good places to eat, stay and explore in cities around the world. Dopplr will introduce a very easy way to say that you’ve visited a restaurant, hotel or, for instance, a great local market. As you visit cities around the world, Dopplr will alert you to the places your network has been and enjoyed. We will ask for your help in building out this social atlas in the coming months. To get a sense of how this will work check out St. John in London at http://dplr.it/eat/qg01.

Looking for a person or a city on Dopplr? Search

We have just launched an improved Dopplr search. Search is a great way of finding people, cities and – as we build out the social atlas – places to eat, stay and explore. You’ll find the search bar in the top section of each page on Dopplr. Give it a try!

Strengthening the team

Finally, we’re excited that Marko Ahtisaari has joined the team as our new CEO at the beginning of the year. We’ll be using our second financing round to further improve the user experience, strengthen the team and build out the business model. In the current global economic environment we believe Dopplr is more relevant than ever as a service that helps you optimize the future and travel smarter.

Conference season in the internet industry has arrived. Heading for New York next week for the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference 2009? Join the group for the conference and don’t forget to add your trip on Dopplr!

The good folks at O’Reilly have given us a discount code on this year’s Etech conference in San Jose, beginning March 9th.

If you use the code “et09dopp” when you register, you’ll get 10% off!

I had the privilege of particpating in the programming committee for this year, and I think it is going to be fascinating, with one of the themes being very interesting to all of us to here at Dopplr: “City Tech“.

If you’re already going, remember to add your trip to Dopplr!

They’re being sent out now – you’ll get an entry in your Dopplr Journal, and an email both with a link to where you can download the report generated just for you.

Also, you’ll notice a new micro-feature – suggesting existing Dopplr users you might know.

While creating the Personal Annual Report 2008 we uncovered some lovely patterns and information that make building Dopplr worthwhile. For instance we found over 250,000 possible coincidences between fellow travellers last year. That’s a quarter of a million potential dinners we could have made possible!

We’ve generated what we call the Personal Annual Report for all our users. It’s a unique-to-you PDF of data, visualisations and factoids about your travel in 2008, that we’re delivering over the next week via email to every Dopplr user who travelled in 2008.

To give you an example, we thought we’d show you the Personal Annual Report of someone who’s had a very busy 2008 – President Elect Barack Obama.

Download a PDF copy of Barack Obama’s 2008 Dopplr Personal Annual Report from http://dplr.it/obama-report

The main info-visualisation element of the report is the 2008 timeline, where we represent the trips you’ve taken throughout the year, pulling out the places you’ve stayed the longest and, where we can illustrating them with the Creative-Commons-licenced, Flickr-sourced photography we use on our new city pages.

Then, in the main body of the report there are a number of other things from your 2008 we try and surface, such as the fellow travellers that you coincide with most on your trips.

There’s the by-now-familiar Dopplr map of your travels which in Obama’s case tells a very interesting tale based on the shape of his campaign. You can see the perhaps-unusual whistlestop trips to Europe, the Middle-East, and Afghanistan – the barely-visible dots of which indicate the brevity of those stops.

Taking a closer look at the USA, the pattern of the campaign becomes more apparent. Larger circles correspond to battleground states during the campaign and other notable events can be seen, such as the visit made due to the sad illness and passing of Obama’s grandmother, registering as a circle over Hawaii.

As a man with strong views on climate-change, the environment and energy, the President-Elect will no doubt be very interested in the carbon estimate of his travels during the campaign as calculated by AMEE.

We’ve deliberately chosen a provocative visualisation here – a scale of the equivalent CO2 yearly output of Hummer SUVs to convey the estimate in concrete terms. Many of us after all would think very hard about driving such a vehicle, perhaps harder than we do about taking a flight.

While we imagine that few of you have had a year like Barack Obama’s we really hope you enjoy receiving your Personal Annual Report – look out for it in your email. As per usual, we’d love to hear what you think of it, and what reflections you have on your 2008 in travel.

P.s. We generated the Obama example from publically-available data on the Obama campaign as recorded by the Washington Post. As far as we know, Mr. Obama isn’t really a Dopplr user. Yet…

Acknowledgements:
The Dopplr Personal Annual Report was definitely inspired by things like The Day-to-Day Data Exhibition, Lucy Kimbell’s LIX project, Nicholas Felton’s annual reports and even, Schott’s Miscellany.

For Barack Obama’s timeline, we supplemented the city images with some excellent CC-Attribution licenced imagery from Flickr users Gongus, Matthias Winkelmann, Wendy Piersall, Spotbott and Beard Papa.