Dopplr

We now find it impossible not to know where our loved ones are and what they are doing at any given moment. Facebook and Twitter, smartphones, instant messaging, the whole glittering army of technological tools at our disposal, means isolation is more difficult than ever before. If Web 2.0 is about anything at all, it is the creation of a vast global experiment in perpetual connectivity. (No doubt E.M. Forster would have approved. His famous call to ‘only connect' now seems not so much a moral imperative as a prophecy.)

Founded in 2007 by Lisa Sounio, Matt Biddulph, Matt Jones and Dan Gillmor, Dopplr's spin on the social networking phenomenon is to market itself to ‘intelligent business travellers.' It allows you to share your travel plans with friends and colleagues. It also lets you know if you'll be in the same place at the same time as any of them. Users of the site make around 10 trips each a year, the top five destinations being London, New York, San Francisco, Paris and Berlin. This is Facebook for the high flying, high end jetset.

Dopplr also provides its users with a Personal Annual Report (for those sad they are no longer in school). In PDF-format, it gives you a summary of all your Dopplr activity in any one year, including travel schedule, carbon footprint, travel statistics and photos.

So, for the peripatetic gentlemen and ladies of business among you, who have neither the time nor the inclination to inform people directly of your global whereabouts, plug your travel plans into Dopplr's free service and soon you might be munching on a croissant with an old friend in Paris or dining out on worms with your colleague from the Mexico City office. Of course, if you are one of the out of touch with the times sort that simply yearns for the increasingly quaint notion of serendipitous On The Road encounters, this isn't for you.