Last month a new travel social network called Tripwolf launched into private beta. The site offers a variety of content, including both professional editorial and user-generated reviews of destinations as well as a Google Maps mashup that layers users' photos onto a world map. Although Tripwolf is yet another travel site in an already extremely crowded niche, they've found some ways to differentiate themselves from the other sites out there. The end result is a good-looking, informative web site that's also a lot of fun to use and explore.
Upon login, you're taken to Tripwolf's main page where you can immediately begin a search using the provided search box or you can click on one of the tabs to access other areas of the site like the galleries (photos), travelers, journals, guides, or the soon-to-be added "trips" section.
On the left side are links to your personal info - your personal galleries, your trips, your profile and messages, etc. There's also a handy scrapbook feature on to which you can drag-and-drop places you find on tripwolf when doing travel research. That scapbook can be shared with friends via email, or, with one click, transformed into a PDF that you can download and print out as your own sort of personalized travel guide.
Tripwolf's investor and content partner is MairDumont, a European provider of travel information who offers a range of printed publications for tourists. MairDumont's involvement with tripwolf allows them to provide content for the site, including destination information and photos. The combination of this high-quality content along with that which is user-gen gives tripwolf a more professional feel while still retaining the fun of a social network. It's also nice because there's a lot of content to explore right away - currently over 200,000 points of interest have been cataloged - so you don't have to wait on a userbase to do all the work for you.
When you come across a destination you want to update with your own info, a wiki-edit feature lets you upload your own photos, add and update places, add facts, reviews, and more.
Thanks to facebook integration, you can easily find who among your friends is already on the service and invite others to join you. You can also add friends from LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac address book, orkut, and Xing.
On facebook, you can use the app to search destinations, keep track of your favorite places, and view what your tripwolf friends are up to.
The site goes public on July 1st and, at that time, they will be adding a way for you to book trips. An iPhone application will also soon follow. However, ReadWriteWeb users don't have to wait until July - you can go ahead and join now the private beta now by clicking this link. (Feel free to add me after you do.)
Comments
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That's really interesting.I have to test it.
Posted by: Movie Trailers | June 20, 2008 10:51 AM
I'd really like to try this out.
Posted by: Brian Breslin | June 20, 2008 5:23 PM
Nice idea and possibly its good but there are already plenty of sites out there that offer the same thing. According to some bloggers the best for now is Chokti at www.chokti.com. Check it out. Its a bit rough but I hear they are coming out with a new UI and over 1 million POI in the next month or so. It will be much bigger than tripwolf.
Posted by: Alessandro Daliana | June 21, 2008 1:10 PM
interesting!
Posted by: areeya | June 22, 2008 9:10 AM