The dopplr effect

Unhappiness is looking down your list of Skype contacts at 11:30 in the morning and realizing all of the folk online 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 thought there really ought to be a better way of finding out who is out and about in my neck of the woods wherever that happens to be. Quite a few ARM folk use their Skype Mood to state where they are and if you look down the list you might find someone is in town and subsequently available to "Do lunch". However, what about dinner? Being married with children, negotiating a "Night Pass" isn't something you 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 Thurs night to the Making deserts with spinach class" etc.

Also what are the odds of turning up somewhere and hooking up with someone from somewhere else? Recently I went to Japan and hooked up with Ian our marketing VP for dinner purely because I happened to hear from someone that he was going to be in the the next town to me? I thought "There has to be a better way!" and maybe I should propose some kind of internal Web 2.0 "See you there!" website 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 people from different offices are going to intersect in the same place at the same time. I had it all planned out in my mind and as my friend Bryn 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 which purports to do the same kind of thing.

Both have their pros and cons, so for now I have decided to sign up to both. Tripit is big and gaudy and dopplr seems to epitomize the simple minimalism that Google has brought to website design. I found that I could hook dopplr into Facebook and this blog (see on the right) so people can roughly see when I am making trips and to where. I just need some other folk to sign up to dopplr. Come on! You know you want to do lunch with me.