Simon Willison’s Weblog

russell davies: datadecs. Personalised christmas decorations made from data from Twitter, Doppler, last.fm and Flickr. The Twitter snowman came from a 3D printer—the size of the head varies depending on your number of followers. Best of all though is the Flickr decoration which represents the apertures you’ve used over the past year.

# 7th January 2010, 9:58 pm / visualisation, datadecs, russell-davies, flickr, twitter, dopplr, lastfm, 3dprinters

Prawn (via) Really nice PDF generation library for Ruby, used to generate Dopplr’s beautiful end of year reports.

# 16th January 2009, 4:04 pm / dopplr, ruby, prawn, pdf

Dopplr presents the Personal Annual Report 2008: freshly generated for you, and Barack Obama... So classy it hurts. I’d love to know what library they used to generate the PDF.

# 16th January 2009, 12:17 pm / pdf, dopplr, barack-obama

Dopplr: New city pages, with public tips and Creative-Commons-licenced, Flickr-powered goodness. Explains why I’ve been unable to convince any of the Dopplr crew to come out and do fun things for the past month.

# 1st December 2008, 12:43 am / dopplr

How Dopplr learns. Dopplr uses global and personal trip histories to disambiguate place names, and your friends’ schedules to help disambiguate dates in airline confirmation emails.

# 23rd July 2008, 4:17 pm / dopplr, dates, machine-learning

Dopplr place googlemaps, with and without Yahoo Geo API bounding box adjustment. Dopplr uses Geonames for most geo information, but is now mixing in bounding box data from the Yahoo! Geo web service to improve the default zoom level for their maps. The JSON callback API means no server-side code is required on Dopplr’s end.

# 17th May 2008, 11:35 pm / json, dopplr, geonames, yahoogeo, whereonearth, matt-biddulph, jsonp, javascript, mapping

In rainbows. Dopplr generates a unique colour for each city using an MD5 hash. The colours are then used in subtle but intelligent ways throughout the design—right down to the favicon.

# 23rd October 2007, 10:39 pm / favicon, dopplr, colour, design, md5, hashing, matt-jones, matt-biddulph

New on Dopplr: The Past (with Pictures). Dopplr’s trip pages automatically display your Flickr/Facebook photos that were taken during the duration of the trip—simple and smart integration of third party sites.

# 20th October 2007, 11:25 am / dopplr, facebook, flickr, apis, integration

identity-matcher. Dopplr’s social network importing code (for Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and sites supporting Microformats), implemented as a Rails ActiveRecord plugin.

# 4th October 2007, 2:53 pm / identitymatcher, plugins, microformats, matt-biddulph, facebook, gmail, dopplr, openid, portablesocialnetwork, rails, ruby, socialgraph, twitter, fowa, fowa2007

Announcing the Dopplr 100. Similar to how Facebook used to only allow college e-mail addresses, Dopplr is now open to holders of e-mail accounts from 100 large corporations. The blog release doesn’t specify if each corporation gets its own special “group” within the application; that would be a neat touch.

# 26th September 2007, 4:34 pm / dopplr, facebook, email, invitations

Top 10 dotcoms to watch. From the Guardian—Dopplr and Moo both get a mention.

# 30th July 2007, 2:19 pm / dopplr, moo, guardian, startups

Importing your social network from other sites. Dopplr now does this from GMail, Twitter, vCard or hCard and XFN. I’m convinced that contact import is a killer app for OpenID.

# 26th June 2007, 1:46 am / openid, dopplr, contactimport, xfn, microformats, hcard, twitter, gmail, vcard