design

Most of you probably know www.dopplr.com the service that brings serendipity to travel by letting you know where your friends will be and when you will meet them next. Dopplr is one of the leading sites in intention broadcasting in this case it's a specific intention tied to travel plans and future locations.

Dopplr also makes for a very nice showcase of excellent design and is well-liked almost universally. Dopplr's team is definitely one of the most competent and outright gifted teams I have ever worked with. The service's lead designer is Matt Jones. Here he is talking about developing Dopplr, object-centered sociality, social infrastructure, personal informatics and other cool stuff:

MX2008 | Matt Jones from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

In June Dopplr released their "Copenhagen" (releases are always named after cities/places) release and with it a feature called public profiles.

Here's a blog entry about that on the Dopplr blog.

The public profile includes some highly cool stuff that might be especially valuable to you if you ever want to broadcast your travel intentions - or possibly your travel past.

For example there's the profile/summary box:

One of the features that people seem to like the most is a world map view of your own personal Raumzeitgeist "Where you have been", that looks rather cool and is well designed:

Your travel past can be made known by a world map + list combination element:

The same applies for your travel future:

Dopplr also includes Tips - on cities, places, things to do, how much to tip the cab driver, random stuff etc. Here are some of mine that I can dynamically pull out of the service:

And finally Dopplr can also tell you how fast you are going. I seem to be having the personal velocity of a duck:

All of this stuff is dynamic and is pulled out of Dopplr live; meaning that if your travel plans change or you add historic past trips in there, the data will change instantly.

This is pretty exciting and cool stuff and I don't know that many other services out there that would be doing similar things, or nearly as good of a job in creating very nice and nifty tools like this for their users. Can you come up with any examples?

Actually this design choice is so good and beneficial that I think a whole lot of other concepts would benefit greatly from incorporating something similar. The simplistic way how it's done is simply beautiful. Why not allow just about any and all social webservices to give out their data like this, if the user personally wants to do such a thing? Sounds like a thing that could only add value and make it more useful, and more well-known, doesn't it?