Dopplr is shutting down | Hacker News Reader

Dopplr is shutting down

dopplr.com

41 pointserickhill28 comments

It's "funny" how often there are posts for "_____ is shutting down" for things that are completely new to me. I'll go to the page and (many times) think "I would have used it if I would have known about it!"

If you don't advertise well (and correctly!), you can't expect to survive, no matter how good your idea may be.

Same here. Ironically, a new travel planning site announcement just popped up on HN today in case you missed it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572902

CEO touts it as "World’s Best Travel Planner", we'll see!

It was because they forgot to put an "e" between the "l" and the "r". For some strange reason, a lot of companies like spellr.com make that exact same mistake, and it always leads to failure.

Might have had more success if they used .io

Adding an "e" was the best thing Twitter ever did.

And an 'i': http://web.archive.org/web/20060802094251/http://www.twttr.c...

flickr did OK

Unwillingness to shell out for the correct spelling does seem to be a negative indicator, though many companies did that once success looked likely.

Yeah, if you're a startup and doing something unproven, you're not going to throw money at domain squatters on day 1.

Yeah, I hear tumblr is never going to sell.

If you're not familiar with Dopplr, this short infomercial has all you need to know:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXNgBs5DPLg

I think there's an opportunity for a SaaS that makes it easy for companies to publish a pretty "shutting down" page. This one is very uninspiring.

'Shutting-down as a Service'?

And when Shutting-down as a Service inevitably shuts down, they can tell the world via their own Shutting-down as a Service page...

O_o

IT'S TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN!

:-)

failrock.com is available...

so is failr.com :)

If you still have data in Dopplr that you want out, now's a good time to migrate it to TripIt. Here's a simple script I wrote to do it. https://github.com/jlev/Dopplr2TripIt

I did not know about the app, the idea is great ,was it a Nokia project? or did they "acquire-hire" it ? (bought it and shut it down ? ).

It was a startup and was purchased by Nokia in 2009.

Which was about the last time it was under active development. I always liked Dopplr but they just stopped caring post-acquisition.

TripIt is about as close as you can get to a functional Dopplr these days.

as an extensive traveler, i experimented with in some years ago. it never really gave me what i wanted in terms of ease of use, nor did the community reach critical mass to yield good suggestions. gorgeous app, neat in concept, but it didn't really take off.

sorry to see it die.

I think today foursquare does serve a lot of the dopplr niche. When i'm traveling and i check in to a new city, i find other folks who are in town. It's not so good for planning, but it works for discovering who's in town.

It would be interesting to graph SaaS products being purchased and then being closed down over time. It would be a good barometer of the skill levels of decision makers in acquiring businesses.

That's a shame, it looked like a really cool service and I've been wanting to sign up for a while. It seemed to be dormant, left out to rot.

I thought it said "droplr is shutting down" and got upset for a minute. No idea what dopplr is but droplr.com is pretty useful.

On that note, are there any plans to develop Tripit further? It's also long overdue for an overhaul. Closing soon as well?

Chrome throws a SSL certificate warning.

As does Firefox.

Certificate expired in February.

NOKIA shaking fist to the sky

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