Matt Biddulph Goes Full-time On Dopplr

Matt Biddulph is turning his part-time passion into full-time obsession:

[from hackdiary: Serendipity 2.0: going fulltime on Dopplr]

For the last couple of months I’ve been working on a new project in my spare time. Dopplr is a social network for frequent travellers, designed to increase the amount of serendipity in the world. It lets you share your travel plans with your trusted fellow travellers, and uses them to find the coincidences, near-misses and surprises. Maps, mobile, timelines, feeds, calendars: you can have the information pretty much any way you want it.

Dopplr’s still invite only, but there’s a good chance you know someone with an account by now. We’ll be issuing new invite tokens from time to time, so keep an eye out. There are some screenshots on Flickr and alpha travellers Stowe Boyd and Roo Reynolds have written some illuminating reviews.

[…]

Because I’m having so much fun and I want Dopplr to be as good as it can possibly be, I’ve taken the decision to suspend my freelancing and work on it full time. It seems they’ll let anyone be a CTO these days.

Matt is right: I am an Alpha Traveler. Check out my Dopplr map for the rest of April and the month of May. I haven’t added a trip to Tailinn, Estoni (Dopplr doesn’t recognize that town) or my return to the States after that post-Reboot trip.

It makes me remember something I wrote last year, on /Ambivalence:

[from Out In The Wilds]

Travel is starting to feel more like the natural order. For some time, I have felt that my greatest value for customers arises from face-to-face interaction. so it is logical that I would need to spend time visiting them, since I am the soloist and they are the orchestra.

However, my making peace with travel is more than accepting the inevitable consequences of my calling. There is a true attraction to getting out, living within the constraints of the knapsack, and having time alone out in front of everybody. At home, I have ample time alone: sitting in my tiny 9x6 foot office, hearing the endless whine of the leaf-blowers, and seeing the same trees, changing, always slowly changing, from my single east-facing window. Taking the walk from my house through the park to Lake Anne for Vietnamese soup at Cafe Montmartre, or a Jameson’s at the Tavern on the Lake. There is something strong that comes from doing the same things, again, and again. But I am clearly not intended for the monastic life, since after a week or two, that pull starts tugging.

In a period of a handful of days, this week, I will have as many as a dozen meetings, with savants and seekers, entrepreneurs and engineers, and companies large and small. I will see a never-seen-before product, learn about a company’s recent formation, and hear some juicy bit of gossip that would have passed me by at home. I will walk many miles, ride trains, cabs, and planes, and flit around within an unforgiving schedule like a nightingale in a silver cage. I will stay out late with new friends and old, laughing and learning, and I will work alone in coffeeshops, here, there, and everywhere.

I am a modern nomad, carrying the minimum of possessions in service to the maximum of obsessions. And it’s different sort of strength that comes from this wandering, from staying in different hotels instead of the same old bed, from seeing the sun rise from different windows, through different branches, reaching for the light.

They say that migrating birds can sense the magnetic fields of the Earth, and calibrate their flight with the arcs of the stars, swirling through the skies. What forces am I skating along, as I swing westward, like some 21st century hobo? I feel a humming in the blood, a deep murmuring in my meat: a call, some nearly intangible sensation of being pulled, going, like the birds stroking the air, like the stars sweeping westward.

In the airport, this morning, it felt like the Earth was speeding up, spinning faster beneath my feet, taking me out on the road, as a traveler, a nomad, an unsettled wanderer. Not some civilized villager, living in the sprawl surrounding an eastern metropolis. No. Something else than that, something wilder, something not bounded, something older and deeper, closer to the birds and the stars. A better way to live, a more alive way to be, out in the wilds.