Octavianworld

Missed Connections

Last night I checked out TripConnect.com   In theory, a useful service: travel recommendations are a popular thing to share, as other folks like Tripadvisor have demonstrated.  Presumably, they would be even more popular to share within groups of folks you know and whose opinions you trust, which is TripConnect's premise.

Problem is, as far as I can tell, you have to manually enter / invite the network of folks you'd like to share trip reviews with.  No thanks.  Within the circle of folks whose names I'd have the patience to  put into the system manually, I'm better off calling or emailing them.

TripConnect's UI looked eerily like LinkedIn's (the usual Web-two-oh pastels and rounded buttons).  So I thought, "TripConnect is a useful focus for collaboration in search of pre-existing networks of folks to use it.  LinkedIn is a network of folks looking for useful things people could share.  Why don't they partner?"  I'm sure someone has thought of this of course. 

I'm more interested in the general case -- what other networks and other service ideas, existing or envisioned, should get together like this?  Where's the LinkedIn API so folks like TripConnect could build mutually beneficial services onto it?

Referrals to stuff like this appreciated!

A Web 2.0 Travel Service That Gets Web 2.0

My friend Perry Hewitt, who runs the online marketing consulting firm Colechurch Consulting (so named because it helps bridge marketing-IT divides for its clients), pointed me to FareCompare this weekend.  FareCompare, an airfare comparison engine, uniquely albeit gratuitously  does the Google maps mashup thing with airfares.  Gratuitous, since the map doesn't add much to your processing of the information provided -- most people know where the cities listed are.  But what I like are the multiple approaches to syndicating its service:  Firefox plug-ins, Google and Yahoo desktop widgets.  (I checked Expedia to see if they offer the same thing -- they do, but only one, and it's the buggy, out-of-date version of what FareCompare distributes.)

This syndication thing is going to be big one of these days.

(BTW, Perry, love your site's new design.)