TripIt, Open Standards, and the Social Web

Over the past several months we've been working hard to add new ways for you to share your travel information with your existing network of friends and applications.  Most recently we launched TripIt Traveler Profiles (see previous blog post or release email) in an effort to further this effort along.  As the resident geek, I wanted to share with you a little bit about what's going on behind the scenes.

We created TripIt Traveler Profiles by utilizing existing open standards that are enabling the open social web because TripIt is an open platform and we believe the emerging open social web is a good thing for both TripIt and you.  In addition to fun travel stats, a nice picture, and a list of your upcoming trips we've included microformat (hCard, geo, and XFN) markup that enables you to tie your TripIt identity back to the larger identity you have built across dozens of other sites on the web.  We have also made it possible for you to publish both your location stream (iCalendar format) and your activity stream (Atom) at your public profile URL so that you can freely share your travel information with a variety of other services that support open web standards (e.g., Google Calendar, Plaxo, Friendfeed, etc.).

For the geeks out there like myself, you can think of your TripIt profile URL as your "travel identity end-point."  For those who don't speak geek, just think of your TripIt profile as a great place for your friends, as well as other services you use online, to find out where you're traveling.

I’ve been playing around with Google's Social Graph API to see if Google has been successful in knitting together my distributed online identity, and the results have been pretty good, at least for the sites that provide me the ability to link back. Here’s who “Andy Denmark” is online:

http://socialgraph-resources.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/findyours.html?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tripit.com%2Fpeople%2Fdenmark

The sites towards the top of the list have more “confirmed” connections back to my TripIt profile since they allow me to link back to my public TripIt profile. The sites towards the bottom either don't give me the ability to authenticate the connection by creating a XFN marked-up link back or I just haven't set it up yet.

You can go and see what your distributed online identity looks like by going to this page and providing some of your own public profile URLs (e.g. your TripIt public profile):

http://socialgraph-resources.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/findyours.html

Once you set up your public profiles and link them to each other it may take Google a while (a week or more) to re-crawl those pages and collect the data needed to surface your connections.

There’s certainly a lot more to come from TripIt in regards to working with social networks and open standards, but Travel Profiles are a step in that direction. Let me know your thoughts.

Comments

[Rob Williams]

Great work! One thing I'd really like to see is have my activity feed update when I travel, not just when I plan a trip. I'd like to see it almost be like a location status. Then I can use that RSS to post to Twitter, etc. Or provide tighter integration with Twitter/FriendFeed.

Another thing that would be cool is to have a Google Map on my profile page that would automatically pin each place TripIt knows I traveled.

Of course, these are nice extras, but they would be cool! Love the service!

[gaia gold buy]

Great work! One thing I'd really like to see is have my activity feed update when I travel, not just when I plan a trip. I'd like to see it almost be like a location status. Then I can use that RSS to post to Twitter, etc. Or provide tighter integration with Twitter/FriendFeed.

Another thing that would be cool is to have a Google Map on my profile page that would automatically pin each place TripIt knows I traveled.

[maple story mesos]

Nice post!One thing I'd really like to see is have my activity feed update when I travel, not just when I plan a trip. I'd like to see it almost be like a location status. Then I can use that RSS to post to Twitter, etc. Or provide tighter integration with Twitter/FriendFeed.