[First post in a while...it took some time!]
I started reading a few months ago about Dopplr…
As I happen to work for one of the “Dopplr 100″ companies, I managed to get a invite-beta.
To read from their about:
Dopplr is an online service for frequent travellers. It was created by an international team of world travellers. Dopplr lets you share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you’re planning to visit. In general, people will find Dopplr valuable if they travel more than five times a year or have friends who do as well.
Its backed by Joi Ito, Martin Varsavsky, and Marko , Reid Hoffman, Saul Klein, Marko Ahtisaari. [Pretty big names I think you'll agree.]
Its a nice idea, and for people who do some travel its a nice tool. It works as a travel tool, connecting people physically (as opposed to online-which is not always nice. And that is it.
The “social networking” appeal is not that prominent, which, some people think is not a good thing, but that would be easy enough to rectify I am sure. [I really do like the ideas of social networking, but I have to say I do prefer actual physical networking-talking to people as opposed to typing to people]. Dopplr focuses on the physical meeting of social networking, as opposed to something like Jaiku, or Twitter.
For me, I like the idea of Dopplr-you can see if people are going to be in the same city as you are, before you go/decide to go. And for me, you can then make sure you can meet up with them.
The site is RSS “rich”, and all of your, and your “fellow traveller” trips can be piped out to an RSS feed, or an ical feed, so you can keep in touch with who is where and when.
Dopplr is also accessable from you mobile phone in that you can send trips and notes to it by SMS, ala Jaiku.
The interface is nice, simple and very accessible. One slight “bad thing” is, like explained in the below video, you cannot really, from a glance, see if people are in the same city as you, on a particular date.
There is a list function that shows your trips, and your contacts trips, but its not very usable, in that it would be easy to overlook some entries. One nice function would be to add a Google map (whatever), with your trips and the trips of your contacts, indicating each different trip owner with your icon.
Regarding information on the cities that you are visiting, it would be really useful if it was able to pull information *into* the city page from Wikipedia, or Wiki travel sites. The links are there, but it requires going off to other sites. Also, a feed in fro Upcoming.org would be good to give an idea of what is happening in the city.
Or of course, if the functionality was given out to the user and they could add it in themselves!
One function that is also incorporated it the whole OpenID notion. Something I have not really understood deeply, but if its something of interest to you, its built in.
The below video gives a quick video introduction to Dopplr.
Since it is invite only, if anyone is interested, drop me a line, or leave a comment.
[tags] dopplr.com , social travel , runningwithbulls.com , ireland , irishblogs [/tags]
I’ve tried Dopplr, but not too keen. It’s a little too minimalistic for my liking. Since I’ve been a user of WAYN.com for a few years I tend to use that, but even that has started to become a little awkward from recent changes. I’ve been looking at a service called TripIt.com which allows you to forward your travel plan emails (from the corporate travel agency) to them and it will plan out a checkmytrip-like page which allows you to then add more information about the trip. It looks like a very nice service, give it a go :o)