UnorthodoxY Archive It's wasn't what you thought

A few days back, amongst a typical ramble, I said

Although having separate location updates would be cool for the frequent travellers, but not everyone wants to be found …

I turns out that a service to do that already exists, complete with Web 2.0 name: Dopplr. It’s a social network thing based around travel, allowing you to track where your contacts are going so you can see if you’ll end up in the same place at any point. It’s the sort of thing that would work really well for people who travel frequently for one reason or another.

It’s pretty slick, the interface is easy to use it integrates nicely with lots of other sites. It pulled my old trips out of Google Calendar automatically and it had a bash at working out which of my Flickr photos where from which trip.

I can produce a public profile page to show where I’m going, it’s linked in the sidebar but dopplr.com/traveller/SpaceDog will get you there too. I’d prefer if there was an option to not use my real name on that page, but I could always change my profile. I’m already linking to my real Facebook profile on the sidebar so it’s pretty obvious who I am.

Dopplr also has modules you can add to your own pages, so I can embed lots of different things here, like this.

I’ve only played with it for a couple of days, but it’s got a lot of neat touches and while it’s just ‘fun’ at the moment I could see it being really useful if more people I knew used it.

Serendipitously found on Ewan Spence’s blog.