While I’m very happy with your ability to share my trips with my friends, and I appreciate the semi-annual personal report, I need to share something with you.

I’m never going on a trip to Delta, Canada.

I’m also never going to visit Virgin, UT. Nothing against Utah (I’ve been there and many parts are quite lovely) but it’s just not on my list of places to go.

In fact, I’m willing to bet that of all the people who’ve ever emailed their confirmations from Delta or Virgin America to trips@dopplr.com, hoping that your automated parser would figure out their destinations, none of them have ever actually been headed to either of those places.

Maybe Nokia can help you figure out how to tune that parser, eh?

Sincerely

Baffled in Boston

I’m getting tired of Dopplr’s consistent FAIL on a common (for me) use case- a one day trip to NY on Delta.

Whenever I forward such a confirmation here’s what Dopplr does:

Thanks for sending us a message by email.

We automatically created a trip to Atlanta, GA, United States (from Newburyport, MA, United States) between February 10th and February 13th

We won’t share coincidences from this newly-created trip with your fellow travellers until February 18th. This is to give you a chance to check and correct any problems in interpretation.

If you’d like to check, go to [link removed]

Yours sincerely,
The Dopplr Team.

The problem is, I’m not going to or from Atlanta – that’s where Delta airlines headquarters is, sure, but it’s a long detour on the Boston->New York route.

I’m also not travelling Feb 10 to Feb 13, I’m leaving and returning on the 13th, and the trip was booked on the 10th.

I can (and do) go in and manually fix the trip in Dopplr, but in this type of case TripIt’s import feature just works.

Tripit’s mechanism for adding trips is superior. The ability to simply forward (or even set an automatic rule to forward) confirmation emails is a major step forward . . . Where TripIt seems better at pulling data in, Dopplr seems to be better so far at pushing their data out, or letting people pull it into other contexts.

Well, now Dopplr’s gone and added some new import mechanisms of their own. This post from the Dopplr blog (ok, it was posted back on July 8th, but it has been sitting in my queue to write about) lays out three new options: Twitter, SMS, and Email:

Today I’m really happy to say we’re taking the wraps off a number of new ways to get your future into Dopplr and share your travel information with those you trust: Dopplr by Twitter, SMS and… Email!

Although I love twitter as a notification service (a way of letting me know something relevant happened) I don’t see myself using it as a data input service. For those of you who would like to, just follow the dopplr user and send direct messages with your trips, like: d dopplr a trip to London July 28th to August 3rd. (Nicely, it also happily accepts @dopplr posts, in case you want to announce your trips as well as put them in dopplr). SMS is another option – you associate your SMS number with your Dopplr account and you can text message the same types of messages to Dopplr’s number.

Finally, they’ve got email working at trips@dopplr.com (wonder how many people will confuse plans@tripit.com with trips@dopplr.com – did they make plans@dopplr.com an alias?).

Interestingly, you can use the same kind of shorthand messages used for Twitter or SMS – “a trip to London July 28th to August 3rd” – or you can forward confirmation messages from booking services (which is how TripIt handles import). This is because Dopplr did not set out to parse all the complex formats used by different agencies, but took a simper approach, as explained by MattB:

There are an awful lot of ways to format a travel itinerary. When people asked us to extract trips from emails, we looked at our long history of e-tickets, confirmations and reservations, and scratched our heads.

Inspiration came in the shape of Apple’s last OS X release, Leopard, and an intriguing feature called “Data detectors“.

We realised that instead of creating a piece of code to decode every email format out there, we could look for patterns of dates and place names in the text (and later, other information too) and turn those into trips.

A happy side-effect of this approach is that as well as extracting information from automatic reservation emails, it works well with short text strings like “I’ll be in San Francisco from 3rd July to 7th July”. This means we can work with many hand-written emails, with Twitters, and with SMSes too.

Of course it won’t work with every variation under the sun (for example, it’s most reliable when an email contains just a return trip in a single hop), but we’ve had very satisfying results in our testing. And of course every email you send us will be added to our test suite so that our engine can get better and better over time.

In other words, rather than specifically targeting all the different potential formats, and parsing them in some structured way, Dopplr looks for some specific patterns in the text and tries to understand their meaning without knowing the format of the email in advance.

I wonder how different this is from what TripIt actually does behind the scenes – how much they plan for specific formats they know in advance – and how successful it will be “in the field.” For now it is enough to convince me to turn off my automated importing and give trips@dopplr.com a try on my next few confirm messages. Then, I can automate a rule in my email such that travel confirmations get auto-forwarded to both plans@tripit.com and trips@dopplr.com, and be sharing my travel plans painlessly.

TripIt has launched profiles for travelers, with some pretty good controls on what is public and what is private:

The immediate goal is to give TripIt travelers one place to track all their travel information and showcase their travel history. The profile includes basic information about a traveler, including home location, upcoming trip destinations, connections in TripIt as well as important travel statistics like miles traveled, days on the road, etc.

It’s got a nice, RESTful public url – mine’s at http://www.tripit.com/people/jeckman

I’ve updated my TripIt Action Stream plugin – the good news is that it will now provide a real profile link rather than just linking to the TripIt homepage.

You will, however, have to make your activity feed available to everyone – but if you didn’t want to do that, you probably don’t want to publish your activity feed as an action stream anyway. (Actually you could leave your activity stream private and still publish your profile link – just uncheck the activity feed checkbox when adding the profile inside MT).

From their email update:

We’ve also received feedback from many of you who rely on trains for travel, particularly our users in the Northeastern U.S. and in Europe. So now, you can click the new Add Rail option in your TripIt itinerary and add a train reservation. You can also forward rail bookings (made on Amtrak, Via Rail Canada, Eurostar, and in the UK Great Northeastern Railway and The Trainline) to plans@tripit.com and we’ll automatically add those rail bookings to your itinerary. If you use other train sites, please forward us those confirmation emails and we’ll work to add them in the future.

Haven’t had a chance to test anything other than Amtrak for now, but it you forward those “This is NOT a ticket” reservation emails amtrak.com sends to plans@tripit.com it does a pretty good job.

It got the time and stations right, picked up the reference # Amtrak uses, and got the traveller info right.

I was mildly disappointed it didn’t recognize Penn Station (NYP) as being in New York City, but that’s pretty easily corrected in the itinerary and I believe it would be picked up from any corresponding hotel reservation you send.

(Not that I’m old enough to have watched Laugh In, but I keep seeing (in my head) the video of Richard Nixon’s deadpan “sock it to me” in the name of this feature)

This is genius – simple, clean access to the info I need without having to launch a web browser, navigate, etc:

TripIt To Me is an email interface to the trip information in TripIt. (This is better known in the tech world as a “command line interface.”) When you email simple commands like “get flight tomorrow” or “get trip 10/15/07” to plans [at] tripit.com, TripIt will email you the information you need whenever you need it. For the absent minded like me, TripIt To Me will be a lifesaver as I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve dashed off to the airport without my itinerary and had to call someone to remember the airline I’m flying on, or the hotel I’m staying at. Also, it will be great when picking someone up at the airport to be able to email “get flight” and see which flight they’re on.

They also took the time to create a “Tripit to me Wallet card” (PDF) so that you don’t have to remember all the potential commands.

If you don’t travel a lot for business, it might seem strange that you could arrive at the airport and not know which airline you’re on, but the reality is I’ve had that experience myself.

Tripit just keeps getting better.

I written before about both Dopplr and Tripit but never specifically to compare the two. Both track information about your travel as well as the travel of your friends, in order to let you know when you and your friends will be in the same place at the same time.

Well, next week I’m headed to Chicago for the Forrester Consumer Forum, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to compare the use of the two sites in relation to that trip. All the images below are thumbnails, click on them to see full size.

If you just want the conclusion?: The fight’s not over yet, but Tripit has become more consistently useful to me. Dopplr’s facebook app and existing userbase is all that keeps me there at the moment, and that is an advantage easily lost.

Adding Trips

Dopplr users add trips by just putting in start date, end date, and name of the city they are visiting:

It’s a simple, clean interface, which tries to autocomplete what you type. They use place names drawn from Geonames, and seem to have most major cities covered. (See posts here and here on how that autocomplete has evolved).

Notes are optional, and can help store things like airline confirmation numbers, hotels, etc.

Tripit users add trips by forwarding confirmation emails (from airlines, booking agencies, hotels, etc) to plans@tripit.com from one of their registered addresses. Tripit receives the email, parses out the information, and tries to assign it to an existing itinerary where that makes sense, or creates an “unfiled item” for things it can’t assign to existing trips.

Here’s what Tripit created based on my forwarding of email from the airline and the hotel:

Tripit recognized, since I sent the airline email first, that the Chicago Hotel belonged to my Chicago trip, and automatically added to my itinerary directions from the airport to the hotel, as well as a map centered on the hotel. (I deleted the generic “Map of Chicago” which had been added before I sent the hotel confirmation email).

In detail view, Tripit also retains things like loyalty program numbers, confirmation codes, seats if noted in the confirmations, etc. All of this can also be seen in a print-friendly format for carrying with you – very valuable if you travel alot and can lose things like confirmation numbers. I also like the “Help Us Improve Tripit!” section, which lets you give live feedback on how well their engine parsed the emails you forwarded to it.

Adding Friends

Adding friends in Dopplr can be done by inviting them to join the service (put in name and email and Dopplr will invite them), by allowing Dopplr to look through your gmail contacts, twitter followers/friends, and/or facebook friends. It can also import hCard format data. As Dopplr also has a facebook app, it has access to your friend information. For twitter, it doesn’t even need to log in as you since your followed/following relationships are public once it has your username. For Gmail, you have to provide your username and password, though Dopplr promises never to send messages without your specific approval.

In addition, you can also view “New Travellers on Dopplr” and “People You Might Now” – these use second order connections (people who were invited by people with whom you share trips, people who share trips with other people with whom you also share trips). This creates a nice mix of deliberate invite (I want to share info with a colleague) and synchronicity (I haven’t seen that person since last year’s SXSW but it might be fun to see if we’re ever in the same town).

Dopplr is still in private beta, meaning people do have to be invited, but invites are unlimited for those already in the system. (Want one, just leave a comment below).

On Tripit, which is now open to all users, you add friends simply by putting in email addresses and customizing the message – no links to your address book, facebook, twitter, etc.

What am I sharing?

Dopplr’s model resembles Twitter’s, in the sense that you have a bi-directional relationship (those whose trips you can see, and those who can see your trips – not necessarily the same people). You explicitly choose for each “friend” you’re connected to whether they can see your trips or not, and they control whether you can see theirs.

This is great, from a “not accidentally disclosing more than you want” perspective, but it actually can be a bit confusing – several of my colleagues thought they had shared their trips with me when in fact all they had done was accept being able to see mine – they missed the extra step. (If you browse over to connections this gets much clearer, as they call out who can see your trips versus whose trips you can see, but if you just glance through the setup process you can miss it).

Tripit, on the other hand, distinguishes between friends and collaborators. Friends can see your trips, and you can see theirs – destinations and dates.

Collaborators can view detailed info and can add plans to your trip – this is really designed for people traveling together to add details to the agenda – events, hotels, day trips, raw notes, data imported from the provided TripClipper (basically just a bookmarklet which adds urls to a given trip), and so on.

Feeds, APIs

Both offer various feeds of your own trips and trips you have visibility into.

Dopplr can give you an iCal format or ATOM feed of your own trips, or the trips you have visibility to. (In fact, the Atom feeds are geocoded, so you can do some fun and interesting things with them). You don’t seem to able to subscribe to specific fiends’ feeds, though.

Tripit also lets you get a calendar feed (iCal) of your trips, or specific friends’ trips, but not all your friends trips and yours in one feed. Their feeds are not geocoded.

What’s Missing?

Dopplr supports OpenID; Tripit does not.

Tripit allows for “collaboration” on trips, but Dopplr does not.

Tripit doesn’t get trains. Sending an Amtrak confirmation just results in an error. I know trains are less common, but in the BOS-NY-WA corridor the Acela is a common mode of business transit, and I know many European travellers use trains frequently as well. It’s also easy enough to work around, since you can add details manually. (Dopplr doesn’t care how you get from one place to another, just what cities you are in on what dates, so it avoids this problem).

[Update: Per this blog post, Tripit is working on rail support]

I don’t think either of the sites is really leveraging the value of the historical data well yet – Dopplr lets you get a geocoded feed of all your trips, including past trips, but there isn’t yet any real way to use this data – # of days away from home in last X months, for example.

Tripit, if you forward a travel confirmation in the past, accepts it and creates a trip – but then it doesn’t show up in your “upcoming trips” list (well, it isn’t upcoming). If you view your list of trips in calendar view, you can go into the past and pull up details on an individual trip, but there’s no reporting on the trips you’ve taken in the aggregate or reusing former trips in a new trip.

When you’re at a conference (I’ve been at both Ajax World West and Garnter Open Source / Web Innovation Summits in the last week) or in an airport, electrical outlets are at a premium. There are countless web 2.0 knowledge workers wandering the halls seeking power. (Ampires, or wherevolts).

This little device turns that moment of potential conflict – where you spot an outlet but all the available sockets are in use – into a moment of collaboration. (In case it isn’t possible to tell from my hotel room photograph, this translates a single three-prong outlet into three. Simply approach the user of one of the existing outlets and ask to unplug them for an instant – they get to stay plugged in, you get to plug in, and you get one bonus plug for a third person or a second device.)

It’s “just good enough” – carrying a real powerstrip with fault protection, etc. would be better, from the point of view of protecting your laptop – but hey, you were plugged directly into the socket already, so this doesn’t make things worse.

It’s small enough to put in your computer bag and travel without problems.

It’s cheap enough that if you leave it somewhere by accident you can just go buy another one.

It’s even in RSS orange.

Sounds like TripIT provides some of the features I wish Dopplr had – including the ability to pull travel information out of the confirmation emails generated by the airlines, as well as more granular (hour by hour) info about overlaps in your travel with friends.

All they’re missing is the obligatory elided-vowel-of-web-2.0, which I think would make them TripT.

Will this be enough to push a switch to TripIt? I’ll let you know once I get my invite. ;)

This weekend is WordCamp, in San Francisco. Chz and Tofu from ICanHasCheezburger, one of my favorite blogs, will be there. (Yes, I have a doctoral degree in English and ICanHasCheezburger is one of my favorite blogs. Deal with it.)

The full schedule is online, and it many folks will use trackback to add their blogging about sessions they attended to the session’s page in the schedule.

Some sessions which look to me like highlights I will be sorry to miss:

• Getting Involved with WordPress, by Lloyd Budd and Mark Jaquith
• Kicking Ass Content Connections, with Lorelle VanFossen
• Blogs vs. Journalism, with John Dvorak and Om Malik
• Blogs at the New York Times, with Jeremy Zilar
• Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing, with Dave Winer
• State of the Word, with Matt Mullenweg

Definitely a high powered set of speakers and in a relatively intimate forum. I’ll definitely add WordCamp 2008 to my “hopefully attend list.”

Starting this morning is Ubuntu Live, which runs this morning through Tuesday in Portland. Their schedule is also online and also impressive.

(A Sunday morning keynote trifecta with Mark Shuttleworth, Stephen O’Grady, and Jeff Waugh, as the first session of teh conference? Impressive. In fact, O’Grady’s already posted his slides and script.)

Finally, the rest of the week will be OSCON 2007, which I will be attending.

As usual, OSCON is enormous (check out the schedule – there are literally 15 parallel tracks much of Wed and Thurs), and that’s just the official sessions, not to mention the parties and events.

Drop me a line if you’ll be in Portland next week too.

They discuss a project Optaros did with Swisscom Hospitality Services as an example of the impact next generation Internet applications can have customer interactions, as well as how we think such applications are most effectively delivered.

The presentations from the webinar are now available:

• David Douek, Product Management, Swisscom Hospitality Services: Swisscom Hospitality Services Room 2.0 (Case Study) (pdf|899.27 kB)
• Joel Gardet, Project Manager, Optaros: What it means to assemble next generation internet applications (OptAM) (pdf|4.05 MB)
• Bruno Von Rotz, VP Strategy & Research, Optaros: The Evolution of the online customer communication and interaction (pdf|3.46 MB)

Dopplr (named after Christian Doppler but with the obligatory missing-vowel-of-web-2.0) allows you to share travel information with others.

You enter your basic profile information, including home city, and then add trips. Adding a trip means providing a destination, start date, end date, and optional note.

Once you’ve added some trips, Dopplr shows them to you in a iist or as a map:

But where it really gets interesting is that you can choose to share your trips with other people – and they can share their trips with you. (Dopplr calls those folks “Fellow Travellers” – does that have no political baggage in the UK?)

This enables Dopplr to tell me, for example, that Dave Gynn and I will both be in Portland the week of OSCON. Actually that’s a bad example, as I already knew that. But as the network grows in size and breadth, Dopplr can tell me when people I know are visiting my home city, when I am in their home city, or when both of us are in some third location.

Right now the network is still building, as they are in invite-only beta. The facebook app should help build the network of users, and each new user gets 10 invites to send to those they want to share trips with.

A few wishlist items that Dopplr doesn’t do well today:

• Handle times of arrival and departure. If I’m arriving in NY at 10pm and someone else is departing at 10am, it’s hardly likely we’ll connect. You can work around this by using the notes field, but I think these should be (optional) structured data.
• Handle multi-leg trips explicitly. The Dopplr data entry screen seems to assume round trip. You get just a start date and an end date. You can string together multiple legs of a journey, but there’s no way I can see to indicate continuing on.
• Import itineraries. I’d love to see Dopplr import itineraries from major sites – either leveraging the “email this itinerary to someone” that most airlines provide today or accepting ical/outlook files. There’s no reason for me to enter this data – there ought to be a universal format for this stuff.
• More granular settings for home cities. I live in Newburyport MA and work in Boston. But I live closer to Portsmouth NH. So I set my home city to Boston since it seems the most relevant to what I am interested in – but why shouldn’t I be able to watch other cities? Or let people know that I’m not actually in Boston itself.
• Let me input past data. I’d love to see, for example, all my 2006 travel, or H1 of 2006 against H1 of 2007.
• Offer more visualizations. What would happen if there were a Many Eyes like system for Dopplr data – my own, or even the aggregate travel of all users, or all users in my network? Might result in some unexpected discoveries.

That said, however, the site has the necessary functionality already in place today to be useful.

I’ve still got a few invites, so let me know if you’re interested in trying it out.

My hosting provider underwent a series of upgrades somewhere back around May 26th, and ever since then you’ve had about a 50/50 chance of getting either no response at all or a “database connection error” page. Things seem (knocking wood) relatively stable now, so I’m hoping all the demons have been exorcised and the host will find solid ground – if not, I’m going to have to shop for a new host (again).

This coincided (luckily or unluckily, depending on your point of view) with two weeks vacation in England (London, the Costwolds) and Ireland (Dublin, counties Kerry and Cork), so for the first half of the “troubles” I was blissfully unaware. (That’s right, I spent 12 days with no internet access – didn’t even bring my laptop, and turned off the data connection on my phone.)

I’ll be blogging some more about the trip itself (and vegan eats we had along the way) over on Goatless, but I’ve also got a backlog of stuff to talk about here – so stay tuned, and sorry for the interruption(s).

or, tired of rebooting into windows just to upload photos?

I just discovered kflickr – it’s in the Ubuntu repository for Edgy. (Looks like it is in Dapper and Feisty as well)

(At a terminal, sudo apt-get install kflickr, or use aptitude and look for it by name)

Very nice. Take a look later today or tomorrow for some Zurich photos from today and yesterday.

This after the phone refused to get or send SMS/MMS messages in Austin for several days – probably the four or five days of the year where I most wanted to actually be able to get SMS messages.

Incredibly, not only did the phone stop receiving or sending SMS messages, it also didn’t tell me anything was wrong. When you send an SMS it would come back a few minutes later with “Message Sent” – no indication of anything wrong.

Seems to be getting them again now, though it isn’t clear if that’s just because I’m not in Austin anymore?

The download you need for the phone you can download from Microsoft and install on a Windows PC through ActiveSync, or you can do an over the air sync by visiting http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile.

What’s a geek to do with so many options and so little time?

Check out the BarCamp Austin YouTube channel – not quite the same as being there, but maybe some of the good sessions will get taped.

I wish I’d arranged my flight into Austin for earlier on Friday – I don’t get in until after the badge pick up area closes, and I’ll miss some of the early stuff.

The left soft-key is zoom out, clicking on the OK button in the center of the navigation pad zooms in.

You can have satellite view or map view, though hybrid doesn’t seem to be an option (may be dependent on level of zoom?).

Menu offers:

1. Find Location
2. Find Neaby Business…
3. Directions…
4. Change View (map/satellite)
5. Show Traffic
6. Track Location (GPS)
7. Clear map
8. Options
9. Help
10. Exit

Nice to have this and the Windows Live Search on the same phone – I’ll compare their results next time I’m looking for directions.

So I’m trying to decide whether I’m finally ready to bring my phone into the 21st century. I have, and generally carry with me on trips, a cell phone (Nokia 6200), an iPod (4GB Nano, 1st generation), and a digital camera (Powershot SD200).

These three devices could be replaced with one – the new Samsung Blackjack, available from Cingular (my wireless carrier).

In the process, I’d get slightly less space for music (I could get a 2GB microSD card for the Blackjack, as opposed to 4GB in the iPod), fewer pixels in my camera shots (the BlackJack is a 1.3 Megapixel camera, the SD is a 3.2 Megapixel camera with zoom – but I’m not really taking advantage of that generally anyway).

But I’d also get mobile access to internet, email, and calendar (synched with desktop PIM), 3G-speed data access (UTMS), and bluetooth, which none of the old devices have.

In the process, of course, I’d also add more cost per month ($40?) for the data plan.

So, I guess in the end it comes down to whether or not it is worth it to be able to get email/calendar/internet while on the road – otherwise, I could just get a phone with music capabilities and a camera, without a data plan or internet access.

Given that I travel a fair amount these days, I’m definitely giving it serious thought – no more buying Wifi access in the airport, for example, though I don’t spend $40/mnth on that now.

I could also use the phone as a modem for my laptop, in areas where 3G networks are available.

Two jobs ago, I used to carry a CrackBerry, and definitely got used to it. But is that a good thing, or a capitulation to the always-on society?

Would my 2 hours a day on the train (when not traveling but commuting to work in Boston) be so much more productive?

Would my traveling (with many hours of waiting in airports) be more enjoyable?

Or do I need to that time for crossword puzzles and other non-work relaxation?

Also, can I deal with Windows Mobile 5.0? I haven’t seen a smartphone yet from a commercial carrier that’s running Linux, and so long as the Windows Media based player on this phone doesn’t *add* DRM to my files (Zune style) I don’t think I will mind.

So last Wednesday night, while I was travelling on business, I realized that my cell phone battery was dying, and I wouldn’t be home until Friday.

Unfortunately, I’d left my charger (normally packed in my laptop bag) plugged in to my desk at work.

On a whim, I decided to try the front desk, to see if one of the employees might have a Nokia charger I could borrow for a few hours.

The front-desk-person (what’s the appropriate polite term for these folks today?) told me to come on down and look through “the box.”

Turns out not only did they have a Nokia charger, which she informed me I could either take with me or just leave in the room when I checked out, they had two large plastic bins fulls of chargers.

Today I found this lifehacker post (yes, I am behind in reading my rss feeds) recommending the same.

Is lifehacker following me around, or am I just having a snowflake epiphany – one of those moments where you realize that you are not nearly as unique as you thought?