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Dopplr Blog

News, discussion and design chat about Dopplr

New city pages, with public tips and Creative-Commons-licenced, Flickr-powered goodnessNovember 27

Yesterday we launched our new city pages.

We’ve had city pages as collections of information and tips for Dopplr users for over a year, and now we’re made those pages public to the internet: the first stage in creating what we’re calling a “Social Atlas” internally.

A few weeks ago we mailed everyone who had contributed a tip to Dopplr and asked if they would prefer to keep what they had posted private to only Dopplr members, and we’re happy to say no-one chose to - so the collective intelligence of Dopplr is available to everyone on the web to help them travel smarter.

Of course, this works both ways, and we hope of course that more people find Dopplr this way and choose to participate to make our social atlas more comprehensive.

Here’s an example of our new public tips pages: tips tagged “breakfast” in San Francisco:

Dopplr for developers: “it’s made of messages”October 10

I’m writing this from the second afternoon of the Future of Web Apps conference in London. It’s been great to see so many developers, designers and entrepreneurs come together from across Europe.

If you’re an attendee, we’ve made you a Future of Web Apps ‘08 Dopplr group that you can join and use to see where everyone came from, share tips on London and share your travels with new contacts from the conference after you leave.

I gave a talk on the first afternoon, on the developer track. Entitled “Dopplr: made of messages”, it’s an overview of how we use message queue technology on our servers and why it’s so useful to developers when building scalable web systems. Here are the slides, complete with notes. Do get in touch if you’re a developer and would like to discuss the topic in more depth.

Dopplr: It's made of messages - Matt Biddulph

View SlideShare

Dopplr Announces Financing Round for Global ExpansionSeptember 15

Today we’re announcing a new round of funding at Dopplr. We’re very excited about this news. For the details, here’s our press release in full:

International group led by Esther Dyson, Tyler Brûlé and Thomas Glocer invests in online service for sharing travel intentions

London and Helsinki, 16 September 2008 - Dopplr, the online service for smarter travel, has announced a second financing round from a group of prominent international investors — all users of the service. The funding will be used to expand the service globally from its strong base in Europe.

The new investors include Esther Dyson, Tyler Brûlé, Thomas Glocer, Yat Siu, Aditya dev Sood, Lars Hinrichs, Joshua Schachter, Brian Behlendorf, Ami Hasan, Daniel Sachs, Joshua Cooper Ramo, Kim Weckström, and Azeem Azhar. Saul Klein, who invested

Groups on Dopplr: Stage #1 - Company GroupsSeptember 15

Over the summer we’ve been working hard to create Groups on Dopplr.

There will be a few stages to this, and the first we’re ready to introduce is the groups feature for companies and corporations, which we launched at dConstruct08.

^ image by Matt Locke

Overall - groups are a way to share trips with people who might not be in your Dopplr network yet, but would share a common interest around the trips you place in those groups. Specifically, in this first stage of our roll-out of groups, that common interest equates to the companies we work for.

What do I mean?

Well - imagine the trip as a “social object” you can place into a group for anyone who is a member of that group to see. For instance, say I worked for SuperDuperBigCo, and was going on a business trip to Tokyo.

Everyone in my Dopplr network would see the trip as per usual - but if I chose to place the trip in the SuperDuperBigCo group then anyone in the group could see it, including members of the g

Find and invite your existing social networksSeptember 11

This is part of series of posts reviewing things we found from our recent user-survey. One of the things you told us was that it should be easy to discover people on Dopplr. We’re going to continue to improve our search engine, so that you can find people you know are using Dopplr already – but that’s just part of the picture.

We call Dopplr a social tool – that is to say, something that gets more useful the more people you share it with. The benefits of safely sharing information and creating ‘social objects’ with people we trust is one of the most exciting things about the web.

However, we’re all getting pretty tired of telling computers over and over again who we trust, when probably there’s the same core list of people you communicate with on each new service.

We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible to use your existing social networks in Dopplr, both in terms of finding people already using Dopplr and sharing trips with them – and inviting those who don’t yet use it to join.