A few days ago, I started playing around with a social media travel site called Trippy.com. In a nutshell, it lets you organize places you’ve been and places you want to go with a photo to represent each of them. Trippy.com lets you organize them in boards. Let’s say you want a board of cool hotels and the best places to get dessert around the world. Name the boards accordingly, and then search for the place in the Trippy.com database. You can pick a photo that’s offered, or upload your own.
It’s addicting fun, and a nice way for bloggers to get an extra link to their blog, generate buzz, swap travel ideas. It integrates into Facebook.com, and it’s easy to share your boards with other social media sites. I’ve built a few based on cool hotels, stuff to do and flavors of the world.
There’s just one thing that annoys me about Trippy.com: When you sign up, it automatically makes you follow a little clatch of flavor-of-the-moment celebrities. And that shows up on social media sites connected to your profile.
I turned purple with rage at the idea of anyone who knows me seeing “Justin followed Jason Mraz on Trippy.com” on any of my social media pages. I un-followed the pre-loaded celebrities with extreme prejudice – but not before it wound up on my Facebook.com profile.
A “nice to have” would be some way to post updates – just some sort of random, pithy, travel-related thoughts. It might exist, and I just haven’t found it yet; if so, feel free to correct me. The login process is also pretty slow – I’d blame that on all the needlessly cute animation – which add nothing to the experience.
So Trippy.com is good social media fun for travel fiends. It has some flaws, but the Trippy.com team seems open to feedback. I’d expect to see some changes in the near future that will improve the site. I’m for once a fairly early adopter (I think –), and very interested in seeing how this site plays out.
This post just might contain affiliate links. Fear not, they’re non-spammy and benign. Hey, I have to keep this thing running somehow!
