Given Dopplr’s stated aim of:
…[sharing] your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you’re planning to visit.
it needs to be a lot easier to find those fellow travellers – most of whom you will have contact with via email, or IM, or Twitter, or LinkedIn or something. But at the moment, there isn’t any way of finding them.
At the moment, you can randomly type in likely handles for people in the form http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/trib and desperately hope that they exist. But that’s not good enough. Given this is social computing/location matching for professionals and regular travellers, it needs to be a good deal easier to find people.
The current self-introduction system is good inasmuch as it avoids the MySpace friend phenomenon of every man and their collective dogs knowing where you are and when, but what I think it needs is some way to import your contacts from email or LinkedIn. There could then be a match on email address and you would at least know who else was on Dopplr. At that point, you could then expose your details as you do now and they could do the same if they wished.
