Filed under: World wide web, Social Software

TripSay is hard to explain. It combines travel information, social networking, maps and reviews of places. As someone who enjoys traveling, I think it has potential.

Basically, you log in to TripSay and build your world by entering places you have traveled. Each place you enter can get a rating from a smiley face to a butt (really!) and a short tip or comment for which you can, thankfully use more than 140 characters. You can join groups with similar travel interests like a particular place or type of travel.

Based on your rating of places you’ll get recommendations on the map that match what you have indicated you enjoy. Most of my current vacation have been to beaches, so the majority of my recommendations were for beachy places. Tripsay uses a suggestion engine to generate your results.

If you want to look for something different, you can click on different icons on the main map to see mountains, shopping, cities, etc. that have been rated by other users.

TripSay calls itself an intelligent social network (that) delivers highly targeted travel information, recommendations and tips based on one’s one-of-a-kind preferences and social network.

I think if TripSay gains a big user base and lots of information it could be really useful to find interesting restaurants and out of the way places that guidebooks don’t cover. But, it will really depend on the amount of users the site attracts.

It is now in free public beta.

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Filed under: World wide web, Mozilla, Social Software, Beta

Mozilla released a plugin for Firefox called Snowl yesterday that has the potential to completely change the way you use your web browser. Or it could just frustrate the heck out of you. Here’s what it does: it brings messages from various sources (Twitter, RSS feeds, and eventually instant messaging services) to your browser.

The concept is interesting. Why rely on pop up notifications to let you know that you need to switch browser tabs or applications to keep up with conversations on Twitter, FriendFeed, or other locations when you can just see everything on one screen? Snowl lets you browse the web while keeping an eye on all of those conversations.

But the truth of the matter is it just sort of makes a browser screen look crowded. If you’ve got a 24 inch display, that might not matter. But if you’ve got a 15 inch, 1024 x 768 display, this is not the plugin for you. Snowl does present a few interesting ways of looking at your messages. There’s an Outlook-style 3-pane view with contacts and sources on the left, headlines at the top and full text in the bottom. Or you can use a “river of news” style view that shows a newspaper-like list of updates.

Snowl is still in the early beta stages. Mozilla admits that there are a ton of known bugs, but the developers wanted to see if there was any real interest in the project before continuing. Thus the public release. What do you think? Is Snowl useful or just another distraction?

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