TripIt Blog

TripIt at TechCrunch50

Our team just got back from the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco and it was a blast. Thanks to Michael, Heather, Jason, and the TC50 team for another great show.

TripIt was one of the original TechCrunch 40 back in 2007, which makes us the old kids at the party this year. But we’re excited to see other alumni like Yammer and Xobni also doing so well. And big congrats to Mint (another alum from TC40 in 2007) on their $170M acquisition by Intuit; read founder Aaron Patzer’s comments here.

Another alum from 2008 was Expensify, a startup that streamlines expense reporting all the way through reimbursement. Both expense and travel data can be a pain to organize, so we understand and admire their efforts. Outright was a first-time exhibitor at this year's show that impressed us, in part because they've built expense reporting into their cool, free bookkeeping service, using Expensify's API. 

This is an area that we've gotten some requests about (including this one from our friend Sean Ellis). We’ve been fortunate to have several other companies integrate their services with TripIt's API, including ExpenseBay which is worth checking out.

On the fun side, we were impressed by Clicker which describes themselves as "a TV Guide for the Web" that helps you find videos online.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by to say Hi and see a demo of TripIt Pro. We handed out a lot of luggage tags and promo codes today, and are already seeing a lot of new users. Thanks!

Will Aldrich

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.

Web 2.0 Expo: Making Email a Useful Web App

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to present at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco on the topic of utilizing email in web applications.  Email sometimes gets a bad rap and is often proclaimed "dead" and yet continues to represent a huge opportunity for developers to enrich their web applications.

The presentation was well attended and I hope people got some value from hearing about the issues discovered and experience gained while building TripIt.  I've embedded my slides from the talk below for all to enjoy.

-- Andy

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