TripIt/Dopplr: case in point

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.

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