How I Would Change Dopplr
There has been a lot of hooha lately - at least in the tiny circlejerk world of web app nerd blogs that I read *sigh* - about the launch of Dopplr, a social application for frequent travellers designed to tell you when your “fellow travellers” are in the same city as you. I got in on the beta test, and have been using it for several months - I travel a lot, and many of my friends travel a lot, and I absolutely need help keeping track of all of the comings and goings.
Dopplr does a pretty good job of pointing out the rare occassion when I will be on a trip at the same time and to the same place as one of my friends. There is obviously value in this, as I hate to eat alone in hotel bars. But the chances of this happening, even with a travel schedule like mine, seems pretty rare. So most of the time, all I see on my Dopplr homepage is the same list of trips I entered in myself. Not exactly mind blowing.
The great thing about having lots of friends who travel is that it means they’ll be visiting me all the time! This is part of the equation Dopplr doesn’t handle very well, in my opinion. I wish Dopplr would add a spot on their homepage that shows what is going on in my home city right now. Right now, I have to click around to a few pages and parse long, unsorted lists to get a good idea of when my friends are going to be in my town. I would love if this information was right up front. I even made a fake screenshot of how this could look!
Dopplr does have a feature that tries to do this - the Journal. Ironically, most of the time, what I learn from my Friday morning journal email is that a friend has already come and gone during the week. This is because the Journal only shows state changes and updates that have already occured - so and so added a trip, so and so started a trip - instead of the current and upcoming state of things as it relates to me. Right now, I’ll only see useful coincidences in my journal if someone starts a trip on Thursday and stays through the weekend - not a particularly likely situation when dealing with business travellers. Instead, they could send me a preview of what is coming in the upcoming week so I have plenty of time to make plans with my visiting friends, or reach out to friends in cities that I’m visiting.
As I said in my recent post about Iwtst, it is sometimes hard to slice and dice the information you have about members into the most usable chunks. I think Dopplr should focus on adding value to the information my friends and I provide by packaging up those pieces which are most important to me - when and where I can meet up with my friends - in a way that I can quickly digest and put into every day use.
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