Social travel service TripSay adds groups (we have beta invites)

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Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of The Next Web. He describes himself as a hopeless cyberflâneur, a lover of startups, his family a (show all) Robin Wauters is the European Editor of The Next Web. He describes himself as a hopeless cyberflâneur, a lover of startups, his family and Belgian beer. If you'd like to know more about Robin, head on over to robinwauters.com or follow him on Twitter.

TripSay, the recently unveiled social travel networking service, has added a ‘groups’ feature at the request of its beta users.

TripSay nicely caters to its community with a slew of social features, and the Google Maps, Flickr and YouTube integration works seamlessly. With the introduction of groups, users can now form mini communities within TripSay around any topic (e.g. Golf, Iron Maiden World Tour 2008, Hiking, etc.) and choose to do so publicly or privately between friends. According to the company, this also removes part of the irritation with anonymous reviews and recommendations, since it allows you to share your opinion with people you know and trust.

TripSay, which operates out of Finland, says it intends to move from invite-only to public beta this Summer. The business model will evidently consist of highly-targeted travel-related ads and affiliate fees to travel booking sites. TripSay faces competition from an emerging group of social travel sites, such as Driftr, HereOrThere, YowTrip, Rummble and others.

Would you like to be part of the thousands of beta users who are exploring TripSay today? The first 100 readers who send an e-mail to info [at] tripsay [dot] com with “nextweb” in the subject line get an invite.