Remem­ber one of the com­pet­i­tive advan­tages I pointed out for Dopplr ver­sus TripIt ?

Very skilled at con­nect­ing with thought-leaders and the blo­gos­phere: Dopplr launched with an incred­i­ble buzz and this atten­tion is sus­tained. It receives way more cov­er­age than Tripit. This is due to the skills and con­nec­tion of the peo­ples onboard.

Well, a great illus­tra­tion of this came via Stowe Boyd. Here’s his lat­est post:

The Dopplr guys have lis­tened to the users, again:

[from More Dopplr Raumzeit­geist detail: Clus­ter Cities][…]

What we are show­ing are what we call ‘Clus­ter Cities’ which is the basis of some new func­tion­al­ity you might have already noticed if you’re a Dopplr user that’s been study­ing their jour­nal feeds/emails closely.

Rewind to Reboot, Copen­hagen at the end of May 2007. We’re sit­ting on the grass in the sun­shine with a bunch of early Dopplr users, includ­ing Stowe Boyd and Stephanie Booth — when Stephanie is the first to voice some­thing we’ve heard a lot from Dopplr users since: “make my trips more ‘fuzzy’”.

By which, she and oth­ers meant that they would like to see coin­ci­dences in the sur­round­ing area of ‘social space­time’ to their trip — i.e. “show me if there are going to be peo­ple I know nearby the stated des­ti­na­tion of my trip when I’m going to be there, as I’d prob­a­bly like to change my plans a lit­tle to see them.”

This is a cor­ner­stone of our goal to help opti­mise travel for Dopplr users — sur­fac­ing infor­ma­tion about such near coin­ci­dences to let them judge whether to alter their plans to make their trip more worth­while. We’re going to be releas­ing a lot of func­tion­al­ity to exploit fuzzy, social space­time through the early part of 2008, but the first part of it has leaked out into the journal.

More coin­ci­den­sity!

Of course, this is only inter­est­ing in light of this post extract, almost 3 weeks before, on the TripIt blog this time:

We’ll keep track of all the var­i­ous places you’ll be on a trip with­out you hav­ing to man­u­ally enter any­thing. Then we use that data to look for over­laps with your friends. If you’ll be within 20 miles of a friend at any par­tic­u­lar point on our trip, we let you know.

To be fair, when Tripit released this fea­ture, Stowe did a great com­par­i­son and analy­sis of the two ser­vices. But if it had been TripIt releas­ing this sin­gle fea­ture, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have got­ten a sin­gle post on Stowe’s blog pretty much just relay­ing their own announce­ment. This is where their DNA/skills show off.