I just joined Dopplr (at this point, why not?). The idea of a social network aimed at facilitating connections between people based on the congruence of their travel plans is intriguing. In some ways it’s a longer-timescale, spatially richer version of our more granular but geographically limited Up4 app. We’ll see if it is actually useful in practice (shudder!).

Anyway — in Dopplr, contacts aren’t called friends (thank you!), they’re called “fellow travelers”. I liked the name, and mentioned it to Emily. She knows a lot more about words than I do, and thought it was a funny choice, as the term used to be a code name for communist sympathizers. After 30 seconds of searching, I haven’t seen any hint on google that the etymology was a factor in the choice.