Dopplr annual reports are – PDFs?!?

I use Dopplr.com to store my travel plans online so other travelers, like Quest employees and Twitter folks, can see when our schedules overlap.  It’s a fun way to meet up with people you might not otherwise get a chance to see.

They just put out annual reports for travelers summing up their year.  Interesting idea – at least, I thought it was when I saw the small thumbnails like you’re see here.

When my email came in from Dopplr notifying me that my annual report was available, I got excited and clicked on the link – and got timeouts.  DopplrHQ tweeted that their server was under load because everybody was downloading their PDF annual reports, and I asked why they didn’t just put the PDFs on Amazon S3.  They responded back saying the PDFs were indeed on S3, but you had to log into Dopplr.com in order to get your PDF’s file location.

Helloooo, bottleneck.

Thankfully they gave me my URL directly, so I grabbed it off Amazon S3 and opened it.  It’s gorgeous alright!  Very pretty, and there were so many things I wanted to click on to get more information, but…

It was a plain old PDF with no links.

How very Web 0.2.

And the funny thing is that people are busting down Dopplr’s door (and their servers) trying to get to plain PDFs that don’t link to anything.  Jeez.