With tools like Dopplr, FireEagle, and BrightKite, many of us make it a regular habit to inform our contacts as to where we are and where we’ll be. But sometimes, our paths of travel don’t provide the most important insight: Why do we go there? TripSay hopes to change that by giving people a way to share information about the places they go – and why they recommend their friends go there, as well.
TripSay lives somewhere in the conflux of location-aware apps, personal mapping apps like Google Maps and Platial, and review sites like Yelp and BooRah, providing users with the ability to plot reviews and recommendations for other travelers.
Using content from Flickr, YouTube, and other services as well as user-entered information, TripSay helps travelers create detailed firsthand accounts of their experiences, recommend particular locations to likeminded travelers, suggest must see sites, and warn of potential dangers. Throw in some interesting icons, voting ala Digg and Reddit, and metrics on most visited places, and you’ve suddenly got a very vibrant community of crowdsourced travel information – with a central dashboard to manage it all.
In short, it’s a virtual tour guide, courtesy of the hive mind.
But what about the economy? Given the current economic conditions, you might think that traveling would be low on the priority list. TripSay offers something for both the have-to business traveler and the want-to vacation traveler. And, no matter what shape the economy, budget-conscious travel is always a popular topic.
While TripSay is still in beta, the service spent a substantial amount of time in private testing before opening in the fall of 2008. Meaning? There’s a good chunk of content available for perusing.
To try it for yourself, visit TripSay and register for an account. Maybe that next business trip can be a little more interesting – or that next vacation could be more affordable.
