dopplr?

Hey, it’s another one of those websites missing a vowel towards the end there! But I’m giving it a look-and-see anyway. There are a lot of trips on the horizon for us — some for both of us, some for one of us, some next week and some next year — and poking around on the dopplr site, it would seem to be pretty slick, allowing you find your fellow travelers and keep track of them — as much as they’d like you to — with relative ease.

So give it a shot…you should be able to find us there under our familiar first and last and user names. And who knows — maybe we could hook up on some future travel together, or at least share some travel tips.

My parents are on the go more and more — and lately, separately. My mom is in Bolivia at the moment (see the map?) and my dad is fluttering back and forth between the main house and their cottage with the dog. He’d been interested, in light of the fuel prices lately, in knowing who was going to be headed up to or back from the little community of cottages up at the lake to carpool. Let’s face it, lots of people are headed up at the beginning of a holiday weekend and headed back at the end of it. The trick would be to know more precisely who and when.

I suggested a pretty standard bulletin board system like phpBB or BBPress to take care of that need, but that might be more overhead than what he needs — just a simple way to keep track of who’s going to be where when. These are already people he knows (they’re neighbors after all) so the information sharing thing shouldn’t be a big deal. Oh, and did I mention it’s free (he’s on a fixed income, ya know) and they have a nice commitment to user privacy? That’s comforting.

This looks like a nice system. Thanks go to J over there in Bonn for featuring dopplr on his blog; that’s how I found out about it.