When you have internationally traveling friends, sometimes all you want to do is to figure out where they are and where they are going. Or if you travel a lot for business or pleasure, you’d possibly want a central location and generate a RSS feed so your friend can compulsively know your whereabouts. DOPPLR.com tries to fill this niche market: however its usefulness depends entirely on your friends’ willingness to have another social network added…
With DOPPLR, you can list what trips you are going to take. Interface is incredibly simple as you type in your destination, DOPPLR will try to make the best effort to guess the exact location. For example, when I typed “Toronto”, it guessed that I meant “Toronto, Canada”, although when I typed “Turks and Caicos”, it thought I wanted to go to Khujand, Tajikistan (and I really don’t want to go there). You specify the dates of your travel, the method to get there and all those details will be saved.
The next step is to invite your friends to use DOPPLR so they can see your trips, and this is where things will be very tough for this website. It is already tough to survive in the world of social networking in the face of Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. It doesn’t look like the usefulness of DOPPLR will be lost to many. There is also a travel guide component, where users can submit what to do when you get to a destination, but the quality of submissions is limiting, and the available information is lacking. You will be better off getting travel information from other dedicated websites.
In the end, DOPPLR presents us with a solution that not too many people care about. If you really want to find out where your friends are traveling to, there are easier ways to find out (Facebook, e-mail even phone calls). And if you absolutely want to show off how much you travel the instant you update your travel plans, I have a feeling your friends won’t be so interested in you afterwards.
As if flying wasn’t unnecessarily complicated enough, United Airlines announced it will start charging for you to check in more than 1 bags. Previously, you were allowed to check in 2 bags: from May 5, 2008, that second bag will cost you $25, unless you’re a Premier United Mileage Plus program, or Silver Star Alliance member.
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