I have to confess, while I happily browse friends’ holiday photos on Facebook when I stumble across them, I’d never realized how much fun it is to explore other people’s travel experiences until Tripl relaunched with its new, streamlined Web app a few weeks ago. Now it’s launched on the iPhone and it’s even more compelling.
As a quick recap, Tripl allows you to add your Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and Tripit accounts, and then receive automatically generated summaries of the photos and check-ins your friends make when they’re away from home.
While the Web app was fun, the new iPhone app is likely to see Tripl’s usage figures rocket. Running a beta version on my phone for the past few days, it’s become one of my go-to, “I’m bored, what can I do with my phone?” apps.
Beautifully presented, the app offers up a feed of the latest trips made by your friends. Tapping a trip brings up a list of all the photos and checkins that friend has made while away. It’s great for seeing a quick summary of what your geekiest friends are up to while on vacation or a business trip (let’s face it, it’s the geekier ones, for now, that are most likely to be sharing the kind of content that Tripl picks up).
While a great start, there’s clearly a lot of work to be done to add really obvious features. Most notably, you can’t view summaries of your own travels or search for particular friends or locations. Tripl’s Peter Sullivan says that both of these features are high priorities and will be added to the app within the next month. An Android version is also on the way.
As we’ve previously reported, Tripl plans to monetize the service via social e-commerce for travel products, but for now this is a simple, fun and very well-presented app that you should definitely try out.
Image credit: Egil Fujikawa Nes
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