Dopplr, an invite-only social network for sharing travel plans with friends, has announced early-stage financing of an undisclosed amount from Martin Varsavsky, Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman and The Accelerator Group led by Saul Klein.
The social network bills itself as useful for people who travel at more than five times per year and want to inform friends of where they plan to go. The greatest benefit from sharing travel plans seems to come from discovering when friends will be in the areas of the world you plan to visit. If you decide to take a trip to London, for example, and one of your friends currently lives there, Dopplr will notify you of that fact.
While not yet open to the public, the company claims that Dopplr’s users have already shared 110 million kilometers (70 million miles) of trips to over 2000 cities around the world.
The investors in this round of funding have financed other notable companies such as Last.fm, Joost, FON, LinkedIn, Flickr, Technorati, Wikia, Xing, Stardoll, Six Apart and Netvibes.
Want or have an invitation to Dopplr? Head over to InviteShare.
Thanks for the screenshot David.
aren’t those who are most likely to want this functionality already using it at asmallworld.com?
This is a single feature of a social network. What’s stopping this feature from being implemented into every other social networking website?
What happens when it surely does?
http://freemyspace.com/?q=node/13
“Always on the lookout for new opportunities, my team noticed the success of the social networking site Friendster and decided we could do a better job.”
Ditto this for every social networking site, and you have MyDoppler, Friendstoppler, Bebopplr, ect. before the site ever launches.
As a social networking site software provider, I would say this one’s a sell without a pending patent. Too easy to clone.
I think there is a lot of potential for a large number of different social networks, only requires some creative thinking. For example,
ColorCoordinatr - make sure none of you friends wears the same color outfit to a party that you are going to.
Bathroomr - this could be a mashup on top of Dopplr and the bathroom findr posted on techcrunch a few months ago. Fast way to have meetings — no handshakes of course.
@Anatoly,
At what point does a niche feature site become so niche that it is no longer useful for general purpose use? That’s the thing. When you niche out markets that slim, it’s no longer worth anything. At that point it belongs on Tripod. I’m not saying this website does, but it certainly seem that they based it on a small niche, and that’s not good for SN.
“The social network bills itself as useful for people who travel at more than five times per year and want to inform friends of where they plan to go.”
SN works best with broad appeal.
If I were a thief I would definitely join. Sounds like a great way to find out when people will be out of town and plan a break-in.
*yawn* when are the VCs going to get it? When your goal is a 25% - 40% return on investment, I guess you will try anything.
They should just do this as a Facebook app…someone else will and they will have the Facebook distribution…when will people learn!?!?
@Jason - 100% agreement with you. People are stubborn and will keep trying to reinvent the wheel.
Online Calendar can do the same thing!
No need for a Social Network. Sorry, Dopplr, Martin, Joi & Reid!
Only self claimed visionaries and ego centric people will want to broadcast how much they travel - doing useless stuff most of the times! Why would anyone want “follow” such people?
@Jason: A lot of these niche players are putting together autonomous websites to tie to facebook apps to make a bigger splash on the radar. Dopply very well may have a FB app in the works, but it’s probably easier to secure VC money if you look like a stand-alone product and not a widget.
“Dopplr, an invite-only social network for sharing travel plans with friends”
Your fu@ken kidding me right? So if I want a couple of million dollars to screw around with all I need to do is have a idea that would only relates to a small group of people and bolt a social network to it. VCs have way too much money. This site will never reach critical mass, lucky the sever bill is only $100 a month (or $10 if it is shared hosting).
For the sake of sanity please tell me that the funding is less then a million. PLEASE!
“… useful for people who travel at more than five times per year and want to inform friends of where they plan to go.”
Use a phone - much easier.
“Dopplr’s users have already shared 110 million kilometers (70 million miles) of trips”
Talk about really reaching for a meaningless big number to make your service sound hot. What, should Geni report the total number of centimeters of height of their user base or Facebook the total numbers of college credits of their users or Google the total number of teeth of all visitors? Is “registered users” too hard to report or just too few?
@Anatoly - hilarious! any more ideas?
burpr - when you burp let us know and we’ll see if any of your friends burped too! jenny mccarthy is the spokesperson.
lintinbellyr - how much lint do you have in your belly button? Let’s compare and talk about it. Video of extractions included.
@ChrisR - you did realize Anatoly was being sarcastic, right?
Did anyone else find the stat of # of miles traveled and shared absolutely meaningsless? Who cares if I make a trip of 5,000 or 100 miles. If there is any value in this site (a point of view I do not subscribe to) it’s in the nodes of overlap (you and I will be traveling to the same city or you have been there and can offer tips for my planned trip). That they put out the 70 million miles comment seems to be a rather strained attempt to appear big and successful. Doesn’t inspire confidence that they are focused on the wrong metrics, though.
Guess they are going for the long tail.
Dopplr, good name: so who’s on your radar (doppler)?
While compiling a few days ago a list of 9 prominent online communities centred around travelling:
blog.wajsbrem.com/index.php/travel-communities-on-the-web-a-listing/
there was one that couldn’t be precisely classified as a travelling community, triphub.com - and that site does exactly the same thing as Dopplr.