Andrew Ferrier

I’ve had my TripIt Personal Calendar Feed specified as an iCal feed into Dopplr for some time, to keep the two in sync by adding every trip in TripIt into Dopplr automatically (I’d give up on Dopplr entirely, as it seems a bit overdesigned and buggy – but it is a bit shinier than TripIt and produces nicer stats, so I’m hanging on to using it against my better judgement). But unfortunately the folks at TripIt broke this integration recently by adding exact geographic locations to the feed. This caused Dopplr to be over-zealous and make the destinations too specific (regions of Madrid and Paris, for example – rather than the whole city).

So I wrote a Yahoo Pipe that fixes up the stream – by removing the exact geographic locations and any items that describe activities and not the trip. Feel free to use it if it’s helpful – the single parameter for the pipe is the URL of your TripIt Personal Calendar Feed, and you’ll want to grab the URL of the pipe as an iCal feed to specify in your Dopplr account.

I grumbled to the nice folks at TripIt because I wasn’t eligible for their referral competition, so they sent me a T-shirt instead. So I think it’s only fair that I put in a good word for them:

1. Try it. If you travel a lot it’s invaluable.
2. It’s free.
3. It’s better than Dopplr.
4. Er… that’s it.

Fascinating. The sexy-but-basic Dopplr has obviously decided to take a wander into less-sexy-but-more-capable TripIt‘s territory and start doing parsing of forwarded confirmation emails from airlines, etc. It will be interesting to see how well they execute on it (I haven’t had an excuse to use the feature yet). I’ve been a fairly avid user of TripIt and so far have been a bit disappointed by Dopplr’s lack of functionality and innovation beyond its core idea. But should Dopplr truly become a tool for organising itineraries, it’ll be interesting to see which wins out. Dopplr’s certainly ahead on the publicity front.