Laurent’s blog

Dopplr is of real help, getting more users

I’ve been using Dopplr since it launched and it was a personal savior from day one. It really meant, one place to manage travel itineraries and a simple way to share it with others. Up to now, I have been using it mainly for family, friends and my close network. Coincidence and other features where not that useful as my number of “fellow” travelers stays limited.

Going back into the system yesterday to invite a friend of mine, I realized they have added quite a number of new ways to discover who is already using dopplr.

• the Facebook application now detects who in your friends is already a member;
• then you have twitter (great addition!) and flickr (seems less useful, to me at least);
• and as everywhere else, you can import your google contacts (without giving your password away).

Using all 4 of these, I was able to locate a lot more people using dopplr than before, including a few that I would love to consider my “friends” but which are not, realistically. They are people I’ve met, people in the industry, people I “follow”. It made me wonder “what happens if I add them as my fellow traveler”.

That’s were it gets disappointing. I can show them my trips, but do they get a notification? (email?) How do they see the request? We met, they know me, but I have no clue how they manage their trips. So how disruptive, annoying, harassing was the consequence of my actions?

The short answer is: I don’t know yet. I intend to ask Matt for his opinion on this, and do some testing with a second account but I have not had the time to do so, yet.

This led me to think that I would be a lot more at ease with sharing my trips if I could set some of them to private/personal. The drawback is that I would also need at least two types of fellow travellers. Otherwise, a simpler solution seems to introduce “public” trips, the ones where I do want everyone to know about. I know it gets in the way of simplicity, but I do want to put ALL my trips into the system and not discriminate. The question is: should I be adding all my trips but sharing them only with a few travelers, or should I be sharing some of my trips with all the people I know?