Connecting people while travelling

Back in the late 90’s I was traveling way too much. During that time, many of my friends were also traveling and occasionally we would meet up if we happened to be in the same city. The problem of meeting up with friends was the effort it took to keep in touch so that we could coordinate. What we needed was: Dopplr, a Web site that keeps you and your friends informed about where you plan to be or currently are as well as being able to share information about the places you and they visit.

Back in the late 90’s I was traveling way too much. I recently figured out that I was away from home more than 50% of the time for about two years and it was when I realized that I was missing my son’s growing up that I wised up and changed the kind of business I was involved in. 

During that time, however, many of my friends were also traveling and occasionally we would meet up if we happened to be in the same city, which was great – it made a nice change from the usual lonely meal or dinner with a client, which is rarely a relaxing experience after you’ve been working with them for 8 or 10 or 12 hours.

The problem of meeting up with friends was the effort it took to keep in touch so that we could coordinate. What we needed was the focus of today’s Web Applications newsletter: Dopplr, a Web site that keeps you and your friends informed about where you plan to be or currently are as well as being able to share information about the places you and they visit.

Once you have subscribed to Dopplr (it’s free) you can enter your destinations along with your arrival and departure dates. You can also add notes to your trips to explain what you’re doing and other aspects of your travels and you can also invite people (a good old viral marketing tactic) to join Dopplr to view your travels (importing of your contacts from Gmail, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook is supported).

If you permit it, selected other Dopplr subscribers can see where you are heading and similarly you can see the itinerary of those people who have given you access to their schedules.

Dopplr also has a page where they list people that you might know as deduced from the travels of those individuals who are indirectly connected to you via one of your direct connections.

To see what is going on there’s also a “Journal” page that shows not only what your travel plans are, but also all of those of your contacts who have given you permission to view their itineraries, and when you and they are in the same locale your journal will show the event. Journal data can also be sent to you via e-mail – for example you might be traveling and should one of your colleagues suddenly make a trip to the same place, Dopplr will alert you.

Dopplr is a U.K.-based service so some of its really cool features are only available to U.K. consumers, such as being able to create and delete trips via SMS.

The key to the success of services such as Dopplr is whether they can “mashup” with other Web services to find and connect richer, more complex user networks as well as add more information with the goal of making the services an added value so great that they provide a cornerstone to your travels. Given that this kind of social networking is still an unknown quantity it remains to be seen how important it can become.

So sign up on Dopplr and connect to me – my id is “quistuipater.” While I don’t travel anything like I did back in the 90’s I still do a little travel and maybe we can meet up for drinks.

Travel well.