The TripIt Traveler Profile is live

You can now create a Traveler Profile on TripIt.  The immediate goal is to give TripIt travelers one place to track all their travel information and showcase their travel history.  The profile includes basic information about a traveler, including home location, upcoming trip destinations, connections in TripIt as well as important travel statistics like miles traveled, days on the road, etc.  

I’m particularly excited about the personal travel statistics.  Frequent travelers are generally fanatical when it comes to tracking their airline miles (or kilometers).  TripIt goes one better to track all distance traveled whether by air, car, boat or rail as well as other metrics to provide a comprehensive snapshot of the traveler.  To make it even more interesting, travelers can see how they rank among their network of connections. 

Beyond the immediate benefits of centralizing each traveler's information, the Profile helps our travelers share their information beyond TripIt with the people they want to know, whether TripIt members or not.  TripIt travelers can now turn on a public version of the Profile and use this as a permanent location on the web where friends, family and co-workers can learn more about their travel. 

Importantly, the information that is shared is always in the control of the traveler.  By visiting the Profile page, the traveler can easily decide how broadly to share each piece of the profile, whether within their network, within the broader TripIt community or with the world at large.  

We have also provided travelers with the ability to publish (and turn off) an Atom-based activity feed for use with third party applications.  This feed includes basic alerts like where I’m going, when I leave, when I get back, etc.  We’re already seeing travelers incorporate this into RSS readers, homepages and blog widgets. 

One day soon, we hope travelers will easily be able to incorporate these feeds into places like Plaxo's Pulse, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, FriendFeed, Xing, Bebo, Hi5, Orkut or wherever else they are social and want to share.

At TripIt, we’re not trying to create the next great social network.  Rather, TripIt is a social utility that helps people manage their travel plans and easily share travel information with the people they want to know.

As always, we look forward to hearing what you think.

- Gregg

Comments

[Edd]

So are you looking for someone else to use RSS feed to build a Facebook app, or is this something we can look forward to TripIt delivering sometime soon?

The Dopplr Where Next app that publishes my itinerary into my Facebook mini-feed is very useful. The trouble is that I have to manually input my trips, whereas with TripIt I love simply being able to email my travel plans to TripIt so the itinerary is built automatically!

I appreciate that I'm not the first person to be asking for this...

Edd

[Edd]

At the risk of talking to myself, I found a post elsewhere on the net suggesting how to add TripIt itineraries to FaceBook.

From the TripIt homepage, click on the iCal link and copy the iCal address.

Add TripIt as an external calendar on Dopplr:
http://www.dopplr.com/account/sources

Add the Dopplr FaceBook app to your FaceBook profile:
http://apps.facebook.com/dopplr_wherenext/

Hope this info helps. As I mentioned previously, I'm surprised TripIt doesn't create their own FaceBook app to do this as it would help to publicise TripIt to a large audience.

Edd

[karen]

I am doing a school project and I was wondering if there were any samples of an 3 month calendar - with meetings and schudle events I can use as a sample?
Thank you
Karen
stropekaren@yahoo.com

[eve isk]

So are you looking for someone else to use RSS feed to build a Facebook app, or is this something we can look forward to TripIt delivering sometime soon?

[Gregg Brockway]

We'd love to build a Facebook app soon, but we'd also be happy if someone beat us to it!

[affiliates]

Great tips, thanks for sharing.