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Today, the Toronto-based travel site PlanetEye officially launched its new travel planning service, which combines extensive travel content, booking, mapping, and geotagged photo sharing. PlanetEye aims to be a one-stop travel destination, where users can prepare for a vacation, book it, and share their experiences after returning from the trip. To provide all of this, PlanetEye has partnered with TraveloCity, OpenTable, StubHub, WaySpa, and Microsoft.

Yesterday, Google released Lively, a browser based virtual world somewhat reminiscent of The Palace from the mid-90s. A lot of people have been wondering why Google would be interested in entering this market, but according to Hitwise, it seems Google is looking at all the major categories its search engine is sending traffic to and then tries to develop a product for that category.

Seattle based travel startup Yapta.com re-launched its homepage today as a full-service air travel search engine. Yapta originally launched in May 2007 as a browser add-on for bookmarking flight information and tracking price developments. The new site has retained this focus, but moved it away from the extension and made all of its core functions available on the homepage as well.

With the airlines cutting back their service in every imaginable way while raising their prices simultaneously, Yapta offers travelers another tool to at least try to save some money on their trips.

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.

According to a comScore study done last year, booking travel over the Internet has become something of a nightmare for people. It's not that using any of the booking engines is difficult, it's just that there is so much information out there that planning a vacation is overwhelming. According to the comScore study, the average online vacation plan comes together through 12 travel-related searches and visits to 22 different web sites over the course of 29 days. Semantic search startup UpTake (formerly Kango) aims to make that process easier.

Farecast uses extensive historical observation and algorithmic analysis to search for cheap flights in the US and then advise whether the price is likely to rise or fall in coming days.

Yes, Driftr is yet another travel social network - but it's one with a lot of potential. Although there are many sites out there that can help you plan your trips, few offer you planning tools and a way to share your experiences about the places you've been. What Drifter offers is a community where you can track your trips, share your photos, blog, and review everything from restaurants and hotels to travel agents and airlines. Like they say, at Driftr "you are the travel writer, the photographer, and the reviewer."

The information you share then becomes a part of the Driftr community. Other travelers can use this collective, shared information to research destinations before making their travel plans.

Hi Everywhere! is an interesting take on the travel social network. Rather than help users plan trips, it matches travelers to local guides in their destination city and then encourages both to record their experience in travel journals. It's an interesting idea, but will it work and is it even safe?