Dopplr.com goes offline on . It was an awesome service in its day, unfortunately neglected by Nokia post-purchase. If you have / had an account on Dopplr, you should go login and download your data.
From their home page:
Dear Dopplr user,
As of November 1st, 2013 we will be discontinuing the Dopplr service.
What does this mean for you as a Dopplr user? You will continue to have access to your data until November 1st, 2013, after which the service no longer will be available.
Nokia apologizes for any inconvenience, and we thank you for using Dopplr.
Sincerely,
Nokia
Login
Dopplr's home page has a login box, however if you use OpenID, use their OpenID specific login page:
I had trouble with OpenID login from the home page so use this instead.
Update 2013-10-28
If you lost or forgot your password (or your OpenID provider shutdown), you can reset your Dopplr password and regain access to your account by clicking the link just under the password field:
Forgot your password?
Enter the email address you had associated with your account. If you can't remember the email address you used, try searching your email archives for mail from:postman@dopplr.com and see where those were being sent to.
Fixing dplr.it links
The password email you receive will have a dplr.it link which unfortunately won't work because its domain registration lapsed. You have to fix it locally:
- Edit your /etc/hosts file
- Add this entry on its own line:
89.16.190.254 dplr.it
Now dplr.it links will automatically go to dopplr in all the browsers on that machine.
Alternatively if you don't want to edit your hosts file, you can replace dplr.it in the reset URL with dopplr.com and that should work.
Thanks to Dopplr co-founder Matt Biddulph for this login/password tip!
Export your data
Once you've logged in, you can go directly to the "Download an export of your data" page:
Click the [ Send me my data ] button and within moments you should get a download of a ZIP archive with your trips, answers, and places in various formats.
Save your Dopplr connections
One of Dopplr's most innovative features was how they designed connecting with fellow travelers. Dopplr introduced an asymmetric follow model long before Twitter, and interestingly enough, in reverse. You gave people permission to view your trips ("Share trips"), rather than asking to follow theirs.
Dopplr also introduced a "mute" feature, a way to temporarily hide updates from a specific person (e.g. if someone you didn't care to follow had shared their trips with you).
Unfortunately Dopplr's data export does not contain your connections: the people that have shared their trips with you, those you share trips with, and mutually so.
However, you can save your Dopplr connections by doing the following:
- Use Firefox to go to: http://www.dopplr.com/account/connections
- From the File menu, choose Save Page As...
- Be sure Web Page, complete is selected in the popup menu
- Save and you'll get an HTML file with a directory next to it of its resources (images etc.) made offline accessible.
If you want to save the raw HTML source of the page as well, repeat the above but set the popup menu to Web Page, HTML only and perhaps rename the saved file to include _source at the end to distinguish it from "complete" version you saved above.
Others you might know
If you want to save a bit of Dopplr's inferred data about you, repeat the above steps, with the "Others you might now" URL in Firefox:
And that's it.
What next?
There are no sites I know of that are able to import Dopplr's data exports, but even if there were such a site, it would just be one more silo you'd have to export from once it announces a shut down.
The IndieWeb approach would be to instead figure out how do you want to save, host, and optionally publish your past/future trip information on your own site, and then import your Dopplr data into your personal site to save and display it however you like.
Regardless of future plans, don't delay. Dopplr shuts down in less than two weeks. Go get your data. Figure out what to do with it later.
Addendum: Screenshots
Exercise for the reader:
- Save screenshots of all the interesting user interface screens and flows in Dopplr
- Publish them somewhere with a Creative Commons license
Beyond "your data", the logged-in-only user interface in Dopplr was a big part of the experience, and is worth archiving in some way. Screenshots may be particularly useful for anyone redeveloping Dopplr-like functionality for their own site, or for an aggregator of trips across indieweb sites. If you do publish such screenshots, let me know and I'll link to them here.
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