Tripwolf, the social travel guide that we introduced last month, has launched in public beta. The site allows users to network with friends to create an ideal travel trip, and also has a number of features designed to help research destinations and points of interest. To coincide with the launch, Tripwolf also announced that MairDumont, a travel guide publisher, has invested about $1.2 million into the company, in addition to the backing it has received from Austrian/American incubator i5invest.
One of the most appealing features of the site is the ability to generate a printable pdf travel guide by dragging and dropping the POIs you’ll be visiting. Unfortunately, while the dragging and dropping functionality works well, the guides themselves are very sparse, offering little more than an address, the hours of operation, and a one paragraph description. It would be nice to see a bit more content in these, even if it was only a summarized version of a Wikipedia article.
Tripwolf draws its data from a number of external sources, including Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube. And while it features a fairly comprehensive listing of interesting locales, it may have a hard time differentiating itself from countless other travel sites – there doesn’t seem to be anything too unique going on here.
This was in my mind since TC introduced it last month as i am a travel bug and really would support anything that makes my next trip(which is a bit rare) easier
But all in all,it still needs to work on Asian sub-continent’s information base
advice to tripwolf and ALL travel related social networks. homepage real estate is valuable and important, you don’t need to put a big google map there just to prove you are travel related….
They lurved the firefox logo.
Interesting to compare their logo to the Mobile Firefox developmental logo http://www.into...eling-fennec-y/
Great product concept.
They should probably pull from Wikitravel, too; it’s a pretty decent travel guide for what it’s worth.
CEO: I love that Firefox logo, I want our logo to look like theirs…but not too much like theirs.
Designer: But their logo is a fox.
CEO: Good point…better make it gray.
Its a step forward in social travel sites but lke the article states it should be more indepth in planning. Its gots lots of good features, i really like how you can have your friends add in on the plan, but again too light on content.
thanks for the feedback, guys! Concerning the content: try our European destinations – we have dense info there already, thanks to the partnership with Europe’s biggest publisher of travel guides.
We know that content in the US is light still – and we’ll be working on that rapidly. You can help us: Add your favorite places right now!
Sebastian, tripwolf founder
Travel social networking sites?
The best one so far seems to be WAYN, although that’s not saying a lot.
There’s also the heavily VC celebrity-backed Dopplr, kind of like the Pop.com of travel sites.
How many variations on this theme di we need?
And there’s also Extravigator for luxury travel.
http://www.GoSleepGo.com Some sparse, but more quality content.
TravelGator has had all this (and a lot more) for a couple of years.
First of all I would like to say that this site definitely needs some work. At this stage it is merely a search engine that only searches travel related topics. Google does a much more thorough job.
Second of all, I would like to say happy birthday to Jason Kincaid, the author of this article. May all of your birthday dreams come true, you crazy blogger.
I would have liked to see some real meat here. Such as comparisons. How is this different than Tripit or Dopplr, for instance?
How do you launch a company called TripWolf without trips? I clicked on Trips and it says “coming soon.”
Well, it’s easy to say all travel sites are the same, but they are not. The travel industry is huge and many sites specialise of different areas (in response to #16)
It looks like to me, TripWolf’s main value proposition is the ability to create and print a personalized travel guide. And yes, it leverages all the social network aspects you will find in all travel sites (friends, trips, suggestions)
As far as the difference between it and Tripit and Dopplr:
Tripit is a travel organizer that creates one’s travel itinerary by forwarding your confirmation emails to them.
Dopplr is an online service that lets frequent travelers share future travel plans with friends and colleagues.
I get that question with YowTRIP all the time. By the way, YowTRIP is about connecting like-minded people to meet and travel together.
As you can see, four travel companies with different value proposition and for different audiences. Yes, you would expect them all to allow you to add trips, suggestions, have a traveler profile, widget, etc.
Felipe
http://www.yowtrip.com
Well said, Felipe!