Yahoo! brought its Trip Planner out of a 9 month beta period today and it’s an interesting example of cool Web 2.0 apps aimed for popular adoption. Users can drag and drop Flickr photos from a pop-up of their Flickr sets to illustrate travel destinations. Maps are put to a commercial use beyond illustrating the geography of search results. Blogging via Yahoo! 360 takes destination narrative to the next level, beyond short reviews. This may well be part of what mainstream adoption of Web 2.0 looks like.
Travel is a crowded vertical, but Flickr is a strong asset for Yahoo! to bring into the game. Likewise, Yahoo! Maps doesn’t have to be the ugly step-sibling of Google Maps. It’s a nice system itself and will likely be well received by online travel site users.
I imagine that more things like this are liable to come out of the new practice of holding Yahoo! Hack Day events. Obviously the company has a whole lot to work with. Interesting integrations of multiple applications seem like the lowest hanging fruit.
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Yahoo has done an impressive job in building their travel tools, proving that an acquisition of one of the 7 dwarfs in a given space isn’t always the best approach to market dominanation- especially when no one is doing anything innovative. By focusing on innovation and integration, Yahoo Travel will beat the other guys hands down by end of year.
I’d like to see an option to upload travel videos, that would be cool…
Typo in the title (two and-s):
“Yahoo! to put Maps and and Flickr to work on travel”
Great work from Yahoo! that will be booster for yahoo and certainly helpful for the users, as they’ll come to know what are the places to visit and how they can plan their trip
Glad people like it. You can submit features suggestions and bug reports for Trip Planner here: http://messages.travel.yahoo.c.....-trip-bugs. The Trip Planner team watches the message board closely.
“Yahoo! Maps doesn’t have to be the ugly step-sibling of Google Maps.”
Yahoo Maps is typically far more correct on it’s locationing skills in my area, designed much, much better, and much easier to use than Google Maps. That quote couldn’t be further from the truth if it tried.
Like all these maps, 90% of the world is bare. Sao Paulo looks like a hick truck stop http://travel.yahoo.com/trip?a.....pid=669845 rather than the 30 million people conurbation of the ABC.
The problem remains the data. 10 tons of functionality can’t hide the gaping holes.
Don, I’m sorry if that was unclear. I meant that while GMaps gets all the love, YMaps is actually very good. But yes, as Kebabzinho points out - these are all unsatisfactory when it comes to the data. I remember working with someone in Africa on a project when, after time, I realized that Africa was just a big undifferentiated mass on the Google Map I set up for the project. Not good.
I think we need to speed up our GlobeBlogr release!
Watch out for Aerith : http://aerith.dev.java.net/
Much more fun and usable than any other tripbook app ever seen…
Those interested in mapping Flickr photo should check out Flickrmap which allows you to place a flash application on your website or blog. It then maps your photos based on city and country name tags or geotags.
Version 2 will be released next week. Here’s a sneak peak.
Great Job
Interesting stuff it’s the TPP for Trip Planner for Professional, in fact the right for tourism professionals to use Trip Planner.
Maybe we will see DMO’s, Tourism Board, Hotels, and other professionals use this great tool and make their own Trip Planer and promotion
Personnaly, I will use it asap
Thanks the guys from yahoo
Claude
Blog Les Explorers
MK: Are there competitors to this service? I seem to remember some independent sharable trip planner out there, in addition to Yahoo.
Not a bad first cut. I was a bit worried at first that they had put out the killer app that would bury my travel blog hosting site immediately. After playing around a bit though, I’m really not all that worried.
So yeah, in answer to Curt’s question, there are several other free travel planners and blogging sites. I’d recommend Blogabond.com over the rest, but then I’m a bit biased.
Jason