Dopplr's obsession with planes

Dopplr - the great and cool travel social network - has an obsession with traveling by plane, that I cannot share.

Since they started recording the means of transportation for a trip (by car, by train, by plane, ... on foot) to calculate your carbon footprint, the default setting is "by plane" no matter what the trip.

Even for a trip that is only 200km... or less.

I checked if I could overwrite this in my traveler profile, but I cannot (or at least I did not find the setting for it)

When you tweet or email a trip, dopplr does not even parse a string like "by car" - which would be easy to parse, given the clear and narrow dictionary "by plan", "by train", "by car", "by bus", ..., "on foot". One could really look for those strings literally.

Dopplr and Twitter problem fixed

A couple of weeks ago, Dopplr (the social travel network) announced support for twitter (and email and sms). That is, you can send a tweet to the dopplr user on twitter with your travel details, and it will automatically get added to your Dopplr account as a new trip.

Of course you first have to register your twitter user with your Dopplr account... (why this is, and why the number of identity silos as ever increasing is a different story, and I'm sure I will rant about identity in social networks soon here).

You do so, by sending a (private/direct) message to the Dopplr account with a secret key (kind of thing) that you get from Dopplr. Once you sent this, the link between your Dopplr account and your twitter name is established, i.e. messages from this very twitter name will be associated with your Dopplr account.

From then on, you send messages like

“I'm going to munich from Sep 23rd to Sep 29th“

to Dopplr and the trip will be added automatically. Confirmation is sent both via twitter and via email.

In my case, however, the registration failed.

Dopplr just would not react to my registration message. Simply ignored it. I first thought, that I did something wrong, but today I got an email from Matt Biddulph , the CTO of Dopplr:

Subject: Apologies for a recent problem in Dopplr's Twitter support

This morning we discovered a bug that has affected about 60 Dopplr accounts, including yours. It meant that when you sent us a message to associate your account with your Twitter account so that you could send us trips, it didn't work correctly.

We've just fixed the bug and deployed new code to our servers. If you'd like to try again starting at http://www.dopplr.com/account/twitter then the process should now work.

I'm sorry for this problem, and hope you enjoy using our new Twitter feature.

Matt Biddulph,
Dopplr CTO.

I tried the registration again, this time it worked.

Dopplr replied with

Thanks, now we know who you are on Twitter. Full usage instructions are at http://dopplr.com/account/twitter

within a minute or so, and then I was able to add my sample trip to Munich (this is just an example, don't expect me in Munich at that time).

Which is then confirmed by an email:

Subject: Re: Your twitter message to Dopplr

Thanks for sending us a message by twitter.
We automatically created a trip to Munich, Germany (from Vienna,
Austria) between September 23rd and September 29th

We won't share coincidences from this newly-created trip with your
fellow travellers until August 13th. This is to give you a chance
to check and correct any problems in interpretation.

If you'd like to check, go to
personal link deleted

Yours sincerely,
The Dopplr Team.

I love the idea to put the new trip into a kind of quarantine for 10 days, but still publish it then by default.

So it works great now.

I was so surprised by Matt's email, that (I guess for the first time ever) I replied to him thanking him for the service.

Unusual... even for cool startups.

(email published with Matt's consent)

Offline... how strange

As followers of my Dopplr profile already know, I'll be offline for 2 weeks, and I guess totally offline.
I'm not really use to that anymore, hasn't happend in the last 3 or 4 years...

Lets see how I can cope with it.

Dopplr - finally - 2.4 Million Cities

Just got an email (and there is a blog post too) that I was kind of longing for for months now .... see here, here and here.

Dopplr Blog - 2.4 Million Cities:

"We’re also including destinations that aren’t cities - things like islands, national parks, and ski resorts. So in future, Dopplr is more likely to recognise names of places you’re travelling to. We’ve made other changes to the gazetteer too, tweaks to the way it guesses which destination you mean when lots of locations share the same name."

And indeed - Saalbach, Krems and Mödling are now finally searchable - or findable, rather... well just THERE.

Cool.
Finally.
Thanks.

Dopplr and city data - no progress

I ranted about this earlier, but there is still no improvement.
Dopplr does a lousy job regarding its 'catalog' of city data.
Sad.

Dopplr's Raumzeitgeist - if only they had proper data

From the Dopplr blog:

While we’re busy working on new stuff for 2008, we thought it would be fun to look back at the first year of Dopplr in our inaugural “Raumzeitgeist” round-up.

Zeitgeist of course means “Spirit of the times”. You’re probably familiar with Google’s wonderful ‘zeitgeist’ report they publish annually, reflecting culture in what people were searching for that year.

“Raumzeitgeist” translates literally as “Space Time Spirit” and that’s precisely what we’ve got here. It’s about where we, the users of Dopplr, travelled through space and time on our little planet last year…

Cool stuff. Unfortunately, they still lack many cities in their database.

Dopplr and city data

Dopplr is a great service... I really like it.
However, the quality of the city/location data ... well ... sucks.
At least for Austria.
Try Saalbach (major skiing resort) or the city of Krems ... totally unknown to Dopplr and replaced with nearby villages that don't make any sense.
Dopplr say that rely on data from the GeoNames project, but Geonames has all those data...(try Saalbach or Krems)... so why doesn't Dopplr know about them...

Strange.

Wien 2.0

Vienna's 11th district goes Web 2.0 ???




(Well I kind of helped with the Dopplrgasse, it is of course Doppler...)

Dopplr and Lightning

I just noticed that Dopplr (the social travel site) lets me subscribe to my trips in iCal.
I did so from Lightning, the Thunderbird calendar plugin, and it works fine.

So I know have my office calendar, my Google Calendar and my Dopplr trips all in Lightning.
Cool (if somewhat redundant, though).

Dopplr speaks Flickr

Dopplr - the travel social network - now integrates with flickr.
As usual with flickr meshups, you provide the "link" to flickr within Dopplr, and then ...




Dopplr will show photos that were taken during the trips registered in Dopplr ... clever, eh ?

Sun wins over IBM

At least in James Governor's Dopplr challenge.

James Governor’s Monkchips: Sun wins the Dopplr 2 By A Nose:

"Sun wins the Dopplr 2 By A Nose Well the results are in folks. During the course of last week both IBM and Sun pretty much doubled their dopplr user populations, but Sun came out just ahead by close of play on Friday."

Well, I'm always glad to help.

Dopplr

Ok, so James Governor challenged us ("us" being Sun and IBM), and since my veins carry Sun and IBM blood (whatever colour that might yield) I had to accept.
James Governor’s Monkchips � Now its a game, an IBM vs Sun game. dopplr meets cagefightr



I now have dopplr account... I just don't travel that much these days... but I checked in my "trip" (within Vienna) to the World-of-Health-IT WHIT 2007 conference.

Ok, I'll most probably go there by underground, but it still counts as a trip, doesn't it... (please say yes).

Know what's great: dopplr accepts openID...

So finally know what I can do with my Sun openid...