Tripbirds Grabs Travel Recommendations From Your Friends' Check-ins
One Swedish startup that's in private beta, but still has popped up on our radar a few times is Tripbirds. We got in touch with the company and found out that they're building a social travel site based on Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Instagram to make it easier to get travel recommendations from your friends.
So say if you're going to Paris, Tripbirds would allow you to easily access your friends' check-ins and location tagged pictures to see where they've visited, so you can find or ask for recommendations. In this way you're able to get real reviews from people you trust, and not fake "outstanding!" reviews from hotel owners. This also allows you to get more personal recommendations than what non-partisan guides like Lonely Planet tell everyone.
Another thing Tripbirds is doing is saving all your in travel recommendations in one place. People often get travel tips on Facebook, but messages and posts get lost and forgotten after a while. Saving this information makes your recommendations more accessible, rather than asking the same people the same questions over and over.
The team was quiet about when they're moving out of private beta. If you visit the site right now you're greeted with a quick Facebook application that shows you how many miles you and your friends have traveled based on your your check-ins.
The idea behind the service is a cool idea that now seems obvious to implement, given today's technology and accessible services. And it seems like they have a good team to execute the concept as well. The three founders behind Tripbirds include Ted Valentin, the Swedish serial entrepreneur and founder of 24hbc.com; Robert Kajic, a PhD student in database technology; and Jonatan Heyman from ESN, the company that developed Battlelog.
The rest of the team includes Philip Möjbro (early Spotify employee), George Brocklehurst (Artfinder.com, Reevoo.com, and spacelog.org), Tomas Måsviken (previously on Deportivo.se) and Martina Elm.
Recently they moved their office into an apartment in the Old Town of Stockholm, and decked it out with vintage suitcases and maps. If you're into seeing "startup cribs," you can find a 360 view of their pad on a blog post here.
The basic assumption behind this site seems to be that you want to go where your friends go and do what your friends do.
I think it fails already there.
That raises an interesting point: is the basic assumption behind social services then wrong as many are based on exactly on the one you mentioned?
Well, for many services it works perfectly. Namely those where you just connect to see what your friends are/have been doing and chat with them generally. Where the opinions are more interesting than facts.
But for travelling, I want to see real info & facts. If I go to a new place, I don´t count on some of my friends having been there and even if someone has, is he really the expert to be my guide?
In travelling, I´d rather rely on someone who really knows the place, may it be someone who has lived there for a longer time or is simply local. That´s why for example spottedbylocals.com has much more relevant view to this issue, I think.
Isn't social media about telling the world about yourself rather than connect-to-follow? I believe in the recommendations but more as an integrated part in Facebook. External services trying to captalize on the social graph will fail.