I finally am getting around to looking at various new features implemented in the Dopplr social travel application. Various new ways to communicate with the app, and the world.
Profiles
I have always believed that creating and sharing a profile is core to social tools ("Social = Me First"). Dopplr has always had a 'within the service' profile, which can be shared with other users, but they have now implemented a public profile that is accessible globally. As an existing user, I had to toggle the public profile on, and select various options:
The resulting profile has a sort of crazy quilt feel, since the various elements are of different dimensions, and no formatting options are provided:
My profile can be found here: http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/stoweboyd.
I tried the email integration in its most challenging: I forwarded an email from Jetblue for a trip from Washington Dulles to Oakland, hoping that it would get associated with travel to San Francisco, and it barfed. Dopplr interpreted the email as a trip to London, and back to DC. And it was a one way from Dulles to Oakland.
Needless to say, I was happy that Dopplr has implemented integration of Email and Twitter message as draft trips. In this case, I just deleted it.
What I was hoping for is actually extracting the travel logistics information from the email: flight numbers, airline name, times, etc.
I tried using TripIt for that service for severla months, but it's like voice recognition: it has to be flawless, or else it is amazingly annoying. Like the time I showed up at an airport, pulled up my calendar on my phone (sync'd from TripIt) and discovered that I didn't have the airline name or flight number. So, I had to pull out my Mac, go back to the source email (from Expedia), and click through on the link to get to the itinerary. Yes, I know that Expedia doesn't provide the needed information in the email, but if I am going to have to manually check every hypothetically automatic import for correctness, I would rather simply enter the info myself, which is probably faster than doing the check and making corrections. So I dropped TripIt.
But now, I would at least appreciate it if I could attach emails -- even uninterpreted -- to my trips so I can have a folio of travel-related information in one place.
A try of the simpler sort of email integration -- just sending a message to a dedicated address generated for my account -- worked as advertised:
This uncovered one problem: Dopplr seems to assume I am traveling from my 'home city' to the location I select in the email. Perhaps there is a way to deal with is in the 'language' in the email, like
traveling to New York City from Paris 7-12 October
but I don't know if that will work.
I never managed to receive email sent to 'trips@dopplr.com' which I understood would work.
Twitter Integration
Twitter integration worked as stated, although suffering from the same 'home city' bias mentioned in the email integration:
A copy of the tweet is achived in the trip record.
Final observations:
- I will watch the email parsing very closely, because I feel that this is a critical area. I would be happy just with a way to associate the emails from Expedia, Jetblue, and others with the trips I have planned, as opposed to trying to discern what I am up to from the email.
- I think I will use the Twitter integration a lot.
- I have dropped my old pattern of calendar integration because of these advances. I formerly imported my travel plans from a Gcal calendar called 'travels (upstream)' into Dopplr. However, I have found that this has decreased the frequency of me visiting Dopplr. I now plan to Twitter and email my travel plans into Dopplr, and sync my travel plans into Gcal, instead.
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