Are you looking for the best beer bars in the world, good places to make out in San Francisco, or where to go on the Big Island in Hawaii? A travel recommendation site called nextstop mixes social recommendations with search and adds a reputation system and elements of gameplay to come up with a new social online travel guide.
The site has been in beta for a few months, although it hasn’t gotten much attention yet. It was started by a couple of ex-Googlers, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, who helped launch Google Calendar (Sjogreen) and Google Groups, and Picassa (Graham). A third co-founder, Charles Lin, was a Stanford classmate of Graham’s. The site grew out of their frustration with finding interesting things to do in unfamiliar places. “It is difficult to discover something new when you don’t know what to look for,” says Sjogreen.
Everything on nextstop is geared towards getting people to recommend their favorite places and organize those recommendations into guides. There are various ways to explore the site, including a search box, by city, a guide view, or a map view (see screen shots below). The recommendations can be collected together into guides (like this one for an architecture tour), which can be explicitly “liked” by members. The guides can be sorted by most recent, most liked, or most viewed. You can save any place or guide in a wishlist for later viewing.
But it is the social aspects which give the site an extra edge. Each recommendation acts as a vote (for any given place, you can see how many people recommend it) and you can also vote individual recommendations up and down. Every member gets a reputation score. You get 2 points every time somebody else votes up one of your recommendations, and 15 points when they “like” one of your guides. To fight spam, your reputation score goes down every time somebody votes down one of your recommendations or flags one of your entries. Entries can also be edited wiki-style. Still, it would be fairly easy to game the system with a few friends.
The members with the most points get recognized on a leaderboard. And you can follow any other member, which lets you see all of their entries and actions on the site in an activity stream (which you can export to other services as an RSS feed). In addition to the reputation points, members can also earn “badges” for accomplishing certain goals, such as being the first to recommend a place, for getting 100 views on a guide, or 10 likes. Any recommendation can be shared via email, Facebook or Twitter (but sharing is not automatic, it has to be explicitly selected for each recommendation). Individual guides can also be shared as embeddable badges or widgets.
The site makes very simple to create a recommendation. These are not meant to be in-depth reviews, rather curated suggestions of things to do. It uses a combination of search APis from Google (for local search, geo-location, image search, and maps) and Yahoo Boss (also for image search) to help you find and auto-complete many of the items that go into each recommendation.
Once you create an account or sign in using Facebook Connect, you can type in the name of practically any bar, restaurant, tourist attraction, or business after clicking “add a recommendation.” It will suggest places it recognizes along with their addresses, and if one of them is what you are trying to recommend, you click on it and nextstop will place it on a Google map and find pictures. You pick an image, add a short Twitter-length recommendation no more than 160 characters, and categorize it as a place to eat/drink, stay/sleep, or do/explore along with an approximate price range (free, inexpensive, mid-range, high-end). Then the recommendation is created and other people can find it on the site. I did this for a restaurant in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, Bar Tabac, and it found it immediately, along with a great picture.
There is plenty of competition for online travel guides and social recommendations, starting with TripAdvisor and Yelp down to a bevy of startups including Dopplr, Offbeat Guides and TripSay. But nextstep manages to do things a little bit different. It is not trying to be comprehensive, it is just trying to provide travelers a highly selective and vetted list of things to do and places to visit.
I guess this was another startup that began before the economy cratered …
What the world needs right now is user generated reviews and guides of soup kitchens and charity shops, not guides on scuba diving in the Maldives
well hello mr. glass-half-empty
Yea well, that exists course techcrunch won’t cover it… an authentic guide for broke folks has to be made by broke folks and broke folks don’t get techcrunch coverage *ahem*….
How original…
Just recycle everything Google and repurpose it… and call it a startup!
How original…
Just recycle a bunch of words from the dictionary and call it a comment :)
+1
Win for Paul Joyce and fail for webPundit
I came across nextstop last weekend and have to admit to being very impressed by it.
It’s a perfect site for exploring and losing a bit of time. They have a strong team, great idea and nice execution, good luck chaps!
Nice job guys. Looks good.
This is a dry turd. So many services do the same thing, they’ve just added different filters.
Also, how do they know Paris means Paris France, or that New York means Manhattan and not Syosset?
I’d have to see where this thing goes before I get all hot and bothered by it.
The website URL of “nextstop” in CrunchBase is missing the first “t.” “Nexstop” takes you to a squatter’s page.
love It.
I will check with Munich – home of beers :-)
It’s like Tripadvisor, minus the useful stuff.
Your linking to the wrong URL, have to add a “T” to nexstop.com listed in your company profile above
I am confused???? What does this have to do with Twitter? (This is twitter-crunch right?)
Another travel guide?
Which came first, Nextstop or Ruba?
I like the look and feel. My question remains how is it going to grow with a lot of other travel sites out there?
Good for consumers, now I have another travel guide on my list. I am sure they all have their strength and weakness.
My choices are:
- people like different things, so I’ll find people with the same taste and follow them on Twitter.
- I love Yelp!, I found a lot of great food there so far.
Crazy IE 7.0.6 displays the following “It looks like you are using a very old web browser, which doesn’t work well with nextstop. Click here to download the most recent version.”
Can’t believe it does not all work with IE 7
yeah, that’s pretty bad
I don’t see this on my IE7 — works fine.
I’ve been using the site w/ IE7 for a while w/o problems.
seems a “repackaging” of concepts… may be more useful as a tool for “locals” trying to find a restaurant in a new neighborhood than for travelers who need more in-depth information. Where is the innovation in this idea?
Considering they worked at Google, this is notable.
[/sarcasm]
+1
PS: Wanted to say great post!
Nice review, but yet another confusing travel planning/guide/community website. People who travel want to spend as little time as possible planning. My feeling is that the people using Nexstop are not leaving the cubicle.
The space is ripe for innovation. Imin, Triphub, triptouch, tripup gave it a good shot. Nileguide has potential. Some contenders to knock out Fodors, etc:
http://www.tripcart.com
tripwiser.com
http://www.homeandabroad.cm
Well, I think as much as there may be other travel sites, this just gives consumers more choice to turn to when they are planning their trips. It may cater to a group of consumers trying to go to places with little open information other than those who have already been there.
Hmm… 5 Google engineers / top talent on all product with multiple managers, no apparent funding, no monetization and the entire team is used to corporate payroll. Top-ranking engineers from google aren’t going to eat shit salaries for very long, with 5 of them and burning about $300-500k a month thats about $6M they need to keep going for a year. Any remaining VC fund right now wants a low-burn startup with proven revenue traction so VC is unlikely.
Relatively dry tech-oriented product and just blew their PR load on launch so capitalizing on that won’t happen. Very crowded space with no discernible niche and competing startups at every turn. Instant exit back to Google (assuming thats the intended outcome) is possible, though its confusing as to why they wouldn’t have just funded them to do this internally if Google saw any worth in it.
If these guys haven’t put their resumes out there, they probably should, I give em a matter of months before a cashflow implosion. The startup world just isn’t what it was a year ago. Without the VC system in place you can’t just start a company with a bunch of expensive engineers, no revenue model and a ton of optimism and have a happy ending anymore.
Talented folks and I wish them the best of luck, they’re gonna need it…
Gotta wonder if google went after them for posting some of their content on their website (conflict of interest?).