Like Ben, I’ve been looking into some of the new travel planning and travel 2.0 sites cropping up, and I came across a cool new app called Whrrl, which has just received $15 million in funding which will go to expanding the service and bringing it abroad (it’s only available in certain US cities for now).
It’s a simple Google map mashup that shows icons of local spots (restaurants, bars, the like) where your friends have been. It averages their ratings of the places and puts an icon over it — one for positive ratings, one for negative, one for split opinions, one for “blah” and one for places that your friends have been to but haven’t rated. It’s available online and as a mobile app for Blackberries (which they promise is coming soon to other phones, including the now GPS-enabled iPhone), or as SMS for everyone else.
I’ve downloaded it to my Blackberry and am taking it for a test run, but no one I know is signed up yet (though I can toggle a setting on and off to view other members’ ratings), so feel free to add me as a friend if you want to give it a whirl (I couldn’t resist it!). So far, I like the concept a lot — there’s a ton of travel planning sites out there, but there’s not that many that put the spontaneity of travel back into the mix. I might clutch my itenirary for a day of tourism, but I like to wander when it comes to restaurants and bars. I’d love to know where my friends, not the whole world, have been and what they thought without having to read through a thousand reviews, look up an address, and try and find my way there.
Your thoughts?
“give it a whirl” – oh dear.
You’ve hit the nail right on the head with the issue of making travel tools accessible to the traveller in transit. It should be quick and dead easy to receive and contribute local information on one’s phone, and this is becoming increasingly possible with services like Whrrl.
Added to that, making content as relevant as possible is vital. Filtering for friends’ reviews is a good step but much more complexity could gradually be added here, if it hasn’t already.
For one thing, surely “blah” is not the correct colloquial term for expressing a lack of impression – shouldn’t it be “meh”?
I don’t think you can put spontaneity into planning without undermining western metaphysics, but I see your point. And Ben’s about ‘meh’.
My question is this: some of my friends have no taste at all; can I toggle individual people on and off, depending upon where I want to eat/drink?
Dan’s last point puts rather frankly the issue I have. I don’t want to know where the best local greasy spoon is. With enough users and data though, picture a Last.fm- or Amazon-style recommendation system for destinations…
*dreams of all the great food