When you return from a trip, wouldn’t it be nice to compile a neat summary of what you did while you were away to share with others? Tripl is launching a new service today that does that in style.
Founded in Sweden but now based in New York, Tripl began as a way for people to share their future travel plans with others. Now it’s pivoting (a ‘zoom-in pivot’ to be precise, Lean Startup fans) to focus solely on sharing what you do while you’re away.
Once you sign up through Facebook, optionally adding Twitter, Foursquare and Tripit, the service will automatically detect when you and your friends are traveling away from home and create personalized infographics of their journey. Your friends don’t even need to be Tripl users – as long as you’re connected with them on Facebook, the data will be automatically collected thanks to geotagged data and assembled automatically.
As for the travel pages themselves, they’re beautiful. Here’s a summary of my trip into London (I live about 200 miles from the capital) for LeWeb a couple of weeks ago (this is one continuous scrolling page but it doesn’t screenshot well in one go):
This is a product that could become seriously addictive. Scrolling through the timeline I saw trips I didn’t know my friends and contacts had made. Even those who maintain that following someone’s location sharing can lead to stalking would agree that stalking never looked so sexy. We’re a little more relaxed about it – if you put the data out there, it’s brilliant to see it put to this kind of use.
There’s still work to be done – more geotagged content could be added into the mix, and Instagram photos are next on the list for the developers. There are no individual user profile pages yet – you can’t even see a summary of all your own trips in a list, they have to be browsed via the main timeline interface. Location data could be a little more accurate too – I don’t live in (and rarely visit) the Cheetham Hill area of my home city, Manchester, and yet it’s displayed in the screenshots above as where I traveled from.
Still, this is an excellent example of taking a comparatively complicated product and boiling it down to something compellingly simple.
As for monetization? “We want to sell travel products more socially,” says Tripl’s Peter Sullivan. “Right now we just have price searches through Kayak but we think there is a very organic way to sell potential trips based on data collection. We have a simple bookmarking feature that will help us get there, (but we’re) more worried about engagement now.”
➤ Tripl
Image credit: Michael Murphy
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