The Dopplr Effect

by Rod / May 12

Unhappiness is looking down your list of Skype contacts at 11:30 in the morning and realizing all of your online colleagues are more than 300 miles away from you. So much for typing, “Wanna do lunch?” to any of them.

I thought about this for a while and concluded there really ought to be a better way of finding out who is going to be around in my neck of the woods (wherever that happens to be). Quite a few of those I work with around the world use their Skype Mood to state where they are, and if you look down the list you might find someone from another office is in town, and subsequently available to “do lunch.” However, what about breakfast or dinner? As a digital nomad who is married with children and spends quite a bit of time away from them in different parts of the world, negotiating a “night pass” isn’t something I can do on the spur of the moment. It takes advanced notice and negotiation - “If you’re going out on Tuesday for dinner with Brian, I want to go out on Thursday night to the ‘Making Deserts with Spinach Class’” etc. Many of you reading this may know the drill.

Also, what are the odds of turning up somewhere and getting together with someone you know from somewhere else? Recently I went to Japan and had dinner with our marketing EVP purely because I happened to hear from someone that he was going to be in the next town to me. I thought “There has to be a better way!” and maybe I should propose some kind of internal corporate Web 2.0 application that allows people to log their travel and have the site tell their work friends when and where they are going. The site could look for co-incidental travel where two or more people from different offices are going to intersect in the same place at the same time. I began to realize that this wasn’t just a fun social application it could also save the company some money. People arriving at an airport at roughly the same time could ride share, get block booking hotel discounts as well as benefit from local knowledge of places to visit or dine from those who had been there before or who lived in the vicinity. I had it all planned out in my mind, and as a friend used to say about software “The rest is just typing.”

Then I met a guy from Mozilla who burst my bubble and told me about TripIt.com, which seems to do just what I wanted.

I also discovered another service called Dopplr.com, which does pretty much the same kind of thing.

Both have their pros and cons, so for now I have decided to sign up to both. TripIt looks more like a classic travel website while Dopplr seems to epitomize the simple minimalism that Google has brought to website design. I found that I could hook my Dopplr badge (a little travel status widget) into my Facebook profile and other websites so people who aren’t members of the Dopplr community can roughly see when I am making trips and to where.

So, next time you’re in Japan, try out one of these tools and look me up. I might just be free for dinner.