Alexander Baxevanis's dashboard

Alexander Baxevanis shared an idea in Dopplr on June 02, 2009 12:56:

Trip notes - public vs. private

There should be a subtitle near the "Add a note (optional)" field in the "Add a trip" page to explain that notes are public i.e. shared with your network.

I always confuse them with the Trip Description, which can only be set from the trip page and is private. I sometimes use the description to enter stuff like my flight bookings so I don't want to make these public by accident.

Alexander Baxevanis started following the idea "What if I live in one town/city, but work in another?" in Dopplr.

Alexander Baxevanis started following the idea "Apple Remote Support?" in Spotify.

Alexander Baxevanis replied on November 20, 2008 13:22 to the idea "Supporting daily commutes" in Dopplr:

I'd love to add my daily commute as well. I live outside London but commute to London almost every day. It would be great if I could see coincidences for both my home town and London.

I also though that such info may be useful when aggregated across cities or groups - would be great to see the patterns in people's commuting habits!

Alexander Baxevanis asked a question in Dopplr on November 20, 2008 13:18:

Calendar events for individual trips?

Is there any way to download calendar events for individual trips?

I'd like to get some trip dates imported into my Outlook calendar, not just for my trips but also for trips of other people that I'm interested in (e.g. when a friend is visiting my home town, or when my partner is away on a business trip).

The "Add to calendar" button in Upcoming (upcoming.yahoo.com) is a good example of how this could be done.

Alexander Baxevanis replied on June 03, 2008 09:37 to the question "Is there a way to add custom transport types to my trip?" in Dopplr:

Apparently people have already started investigated the carbon impact of human spaceflight:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/...

Alexander Baxevanis replied on June 01, 2008 17:21 to the discussion "What sorts of comparison would best help you evaluate your carbon figures on Dopplr?" in Dopplr:

Hi Matt,

assuming that people enter their travel plans in DOPPLR when they are still provisional & not fully fixed, you can embed carbon footprint comparison in the trip entry process, linked with the transport medium selection. If somebody can see that the footprint of taking a plane is X times that of taking a train, they may change their mind and their travel plans if they still can. Of course, this make sense when you can offer viable alternatives (i.e. don't try to convince somebody flying from London to NY to take the train!).

That's the only reasonable comparison that I can think of - I can't see what you could compare a yearly (or monthly) total to. You could try to plot it against a distribution of carbon footprints of other travellers gathered through DOPPLR, but who's to say that this is representative of the whole population? If anything, it may be skewed upwards, and give people the illusion that their carbon footprint is as much as their peer group, and that's OK.

Hope this helps - disclaimer: I don't use the carbon feature as I think it's pointless to try and over-optimise life like that, so I may be missing something important here ;-)

Cheers,
Alex

Alexander Baxevanis replied on May 23, 2008 12:49 to the question "Is there a way to add custom transport types to my trip?" in Dopplr:

Just wait until space travel becomes mainstream & you'll have to design DOPPLR INTRGALACTK (BETA) - how do you calculate the impact of ion propulsion engines emitting ions that pollute the space vacuum? I guess the space-friendly way of traveling will be by solar sail...

Alexander Baxevanis replied on May 23, 2008 12:33 to the question "Is there a way to add custom transport types to my trip?" in Dopplr:

I second this request: just tried to add my London to Brighton cycling marathon but there is no cycling option. And having to put it under car/train/air looks really silly - I wish there was just an "other" option. I like to have correct data for my record as well - not just for the carbon calculation. But at least adding the carbon profile for the bike should be easy - it can simply be zero. Or do we need to count carbon needed to produce all the food and drink that will enable me to cycle such a distance? Now I'm confused!

Alexander Baxevanis started following the question "Is there a way to add custom transport types to my trip?" in Dopplr.

Alexander Baxevanis marked one of happyfarmr's replies in Dopplr as useful. happyfarmr replied to the idea "Addinging future-presence based on airline and hotel confirmation emails".

Alexander Baxevanis started following the idea "Dopplr could use a way to designate people you are traveling with on a particular trip." in Dopplr.

Alexander Baxevanis replied on February 28, 2008 11:08 to the idea "Addinging future-presence based on airline and hotel confirmation emails" in Dopplr:

Follow-up after checking-out Tripit: I forwarded two reservations. First is from GetThere (corp travel booking website) which is claimed to be supported by Tripit. Some things got recognised, but there are some silly mistakes: my hotel name is "Inn" instead of "Holiday Inn", and my airline is "Airways" instead of "British Airways". Second booking was from Eurostar, it was not recognised at all although Tripit claims to support parsing Eurostar e-mails. My verdict? I really can't bother with Tripit if it has such a success rate and I need to correct stuff all the time.

And now for some constructive suggestions:
- All you need to identify a hotel location is an approximation of the hotel name & a big database of hotels. Tripadvisor's database seems to be rather complete, but I can't see any public API that would allow querying it :(
- Same for flights, you can get the flight schedule if you have just a flight number and a lookup API such us http://www.flightstats.com/go/About/x... (seems to be commercial, unfortunately)

I would prefer to log in to DOPPLR and past couple of hotel names & flight numbers, rather than forward a booking e-mail and pray that XYZ Airline hasn't changed their e-mail template... :)

Alexander Baxevanis replied on February 28, 2008 08:03 to the idea "Addinging future-presence based on airline and hotel confirmation emails" in Dopplr:

I can see two sides to this issue:

1) "Two people being in New York or Shanghai at the same time is academic if they are staying in opposite parts of town": I don't fully agree with that rationale and I wouldn't trust any website to do such fine-grained matching for me. It may take 30min trip across a city to see somebody, but what if I'll have lots of free time anyway, or if I haven't seen that person for quite a while. DOPPLR seems to move in the opposite direction, with the fuzzier matching (in terms of both space and time), and I been given the options and making the final decision.

2) I haven't used Tripit yet (will check it out today) and I don't know what it does to all the details that it gets from confirmation e-mail. I wouldn't want everyone to know which hotel I'm staying in or where I'll be having my dinner. I can imagine sharing such information with people who are joining me in some part of my trip, but should DOPPLR store such info it would also need some smart privacy model to handle this.

Alexander Baxevanis replied on February 27, 2008 23:46 to the discussion "Help us improve the Manage Connections page" in Dopplr:

Since DOPPLR is about travelling, I would think that the contacts page could have an travel-related focus. How about organising it by:

- Distance to you
- Frequency of contact (joint travels or visits to their home town)
- (further down the road) why not give you a rough estimate of how much it would cost to visit each contact (average/median price)

I'm thinking of something like:

----------------------------------------------------------
John Doe
Paris, 213 miles away, 2hrs by train
You haven't met John for more than 6 months
You could be there for only £76 by Eurostar
----------------------------------------------------------

That could encourage people to hook up more frequently. On the other hand, I'm not sure if this would best fit the 'Manage Contacts' page or the 'Fellow Travellers' overview.

Alexander Baxevanis replied on February 27, 2008 22:54 to the discussion "Help us improve the Manage Connections page" in Dopplr:

Hi Celia, good luck with your new job :)
Do you have any figures about the distribution of the number of contacts per person?
The page looks fine to me now, but it may be because I only have 10 contacts or so, I can imagine it may not scale very well to 100+ contacts....