Many of you have wished for a search function on dodo.com for a long time.
Have a look on dodo.com! Your wish has come true

You can now search for members, places, sites and much more. And, even more
important, you will be able to find what you are looking for. Well,
most likely. If not, I guess, you haven’t invited enough friends who
have been to the places you are looking for.

You may have wondered why it took us so long to come up with a search
function. Well, it was complicated.

Check it out and tell us what you think! You can, for example, write a
comment directly to this blog entry or if there are still any bugs please
use our problem box on the bottom of each dodo.com site.

Enjoy!

Our dodo.com blog can now also be found under technorati.com. Our Technorati Profile can be found under dodotravelservices. You’re not familiar with Technorati? Well, Technorati is an Internet search engine for blogs and other user-generated content entries. By the way, when you search for dodo.com on the technorati website you will find many blog posts and reviews about dodo.com.

Our dodo.com community is becoming bigger and bigger. Everyday we have somewhere between 6 and 10 new members. (Without counting users who register but haven’t activated their account.)

We are very happy to see that dodo.com is becoming more and more popular. We would, however, be even happier if all new members would upload a profile picture. We feel this is the best way to begin actively participating in our community. All new member who have uploaded a profile picture will be shown on the main page - under new members. Appearing in this box is often the first step to valuable communication between members.

By the way, did you know? Already logged in members can welcome new members by clicking on the welcome button - under the profile picture of a member - in the new member box.

We are hoping for continuous increase in our number of members. So, please keep inviting your travel mates to dodo.com. Thanks a lot!

Phew! Three cheers to our technicians. They found the bug which led to many log in problems over the last few days. We are sorry for any inconvenience.

From now on, you can log into dodo.com - without any difficulties. If for any reason you still have log in problems, please let us know.

As you may have noticed, we had some performance problems during the first weeks of the beta phase that started in March.

We have spent quite a bit of time correcting these problems. We modified our database and implemented caching functionality into the site. Site-performance went up significantly since we implemented these improvements.

There are still a few features that are taking a while, but overall the site is pretty fast and reliable. Let us know if you still feel the site is too slow. We’re working on it…

Our productivity will decrease by at least 46.5% over the next 2 weeks. We regrettably had to send in our coffee machine - a Jura Impressa F50 - for maintenance purposes.

It has served us well over the last 2 years, providing a total of 21,659 cups of coffee. Mostly Latte Macchiatos. In roughly 400 working days, that is an average of 54 Latte Macchiatos a day, assuming that a 14-person team makes an average of 4 cups per person per day. Actually, 30% of our team doesn’t drink coffee, so that makes an average of 6 Latte Macchiatos per coffee drinking team member per day.

After considering the numbers, it is easy to understand why it will be tough for us to live without the coffee machine for 2 weeks…

On the other hand, 21,659 Latte Macchiatos with an average preparation time of 3 minutes each means that we have spent 64,977 minutes preparing coffee. That’s 1,082 hours, or 45 days, which is more than 2 months full time work. Hmmm… Now that I think about it, our productivity might possibly increase over the next weeks

We expected it wouldn’t be easy to build an online travel community. As it turns out, we were right. It is obvious that simply sending out news about a new travel community called dodo.com will not result in hundreds of new members or instant community activity.

We haven’t done much marketing yet, and thus, cannot expect great results. BUT, there are basic interactions on the website, and they are occurring more and more often. People invite each other and share past and future travels as well as travel tips.

It makes me happy when I see a new member that was invited by an active dodo.com member. We hope this kind of community activity increases over time. Last week, I chatted with Claudio from Argentina (http://www.dodo.com/de/travelfriends/todosmisviajes.com/) on dodo.com. I don’t know how he found out about us, but he signed up and it was great fun to talk to someone on the other side of the world with dodo.com.

Our goal is to build a worldwide community of travelers. The idea is simple:  the people who know the best travel destinations are the people who live in those places. So, if I plan to visit Argentina, I would ask Claudio where to go

As I said, we haven’t started heavily marketing dodo.com yet. But, we are about to get started! I hope you hear or read about dodo.com in the months to come! We are not in a hurry. A good friend of mine used to say, “slow and steady always wins.” That’s how we try to make dodo.com better - slow and steady.

Do you like dodo.com and want it to be more informative and helpful? Help out by telling us how to improve. Tell us what you are missing on the site and tell friends all over the world to sign up.

Have you seen our special dodo drawn for the blog? No? How could you? Check it out at the top right corner of the page. Now the dodo leads your way from the main page to the blog on dodo.com.

I get the feeling that the dodo gives quite a good impression about blogging itself. Though, it is rare to find me sitting there as our blog dodo does when I am thinking of writing my next post. I am keen to hear whether you like the blog dodo as much as I do.

I wish you happy Easter and hope you have many, many Easter eggs to collect.

As we are still in the invitation-only phase, all registered members of dodo.com can now invite their friends and travel mates.

If you are interested in our mascot and logo –the dodo– you can find information about it on the main page under “The Legend of the Dodo”. If you find some new aspects about –the dodo– we are curious to hear them.

We had two designers work on the appearance of our Dodo. Below you will find the two options we are working with. We are curious about your opinion.

Which dodo you like better? Please feel free to make suggestions on how to improve either of the two designs…

Design A:

Design B: