Published on Saturday, May 31 2008
(Via the TripIt blog)
TripIt has launched profiles for travelers, with some pretty good controls on what is public and what is private:
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.
It’s got a nice, RESTful public url – mine’s at http://www.tripit.com/people/jeckman
I’ve updated my TripIt Action Stream plugin – the good news is that it will now provide a real profile link rather than just linking to the TripIt homepage.
You will, however, have to make your activity feed available to everyone – but if you didn’t want to do that, you probably don’t want to publish your activity feed as an action stream anyway. (Actually you could leave your activity stream private and still publish your profile link – just uncheck the activity feed checkbox when adding the profile inside MT).
Published on Friday, November 9 2007
Ok, so I’m a bit behind in reporting the news here – I see from my email that TripIt added rail back on November 1st. But it was one of my few gripes about tripit, so I felt it was worth noting.
From their email update:
We’ve also received feedback from many of you who rely on trains for travel, particularly our users in the Northeastern U.S. and in Europe. So now, you can click the new Add Rail option in your TripIt itinerary and add a train reservation. You can also forward rail bookings (made on Amtrak, Via Rail Canada, Eurostar, and in the UK Great Northeastern Railway and The Trainline) to plans@tripit.com and we’ll automatically add those rail bookings to your itinerary. If you use other train sites, please forward us those confirmation emails and we’ll work to add them in the future.
Haven’t had a chance to test anything other than Amtrak for now, but it you forward those “This is NOT a ticket” reservation emails amtrak.com sends to plans@tripit.com it does a pretty good job.
It got the time and stations right, picked up the reference # Amtrak uses, and got the traveller info right.
I was mildly disappointed it didn’t recognize Penn Station (NYP) as being in New York City, but that’s pretty easily corrected in the itinerary and I believe it would be picked up from any corresponding hotel reservation you send.
Published on Wednesday, October 24 2007
Via the TripIt Blog comes the announcement of their mobile (email, really) offering called Tripit To Me.
(Not that I’m old enough to have watched Laugh In, but I keep seeing (in my head) the video of Richard Nixon’s deadpan “sock it to me” in the name of this feature)
This is genius – simple, clean access to the info I need without having to launch a web browser, navigate, etc:
TripIt To Me is an email interface to the trip information in TripIt. (This is better known in the tech world as a “command line interface.”) When you email simple commands like “get flight tomorrow†or “get trip 10/15/07†to plans [at] tripit.com, TripIt will email you the information you need whenever you need it. For the absent minded like me, TripIt To Me will be a lifesaver as I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve dashed off to the airport without my itinerary and had to call someone to remember the airline I’m flying on, or the hotel I’m staying at. Also, it will be great when picking someone up at the airport to be able to email “get flight†and see which flight they’re on.
They also took the time to create a “Tripit to me Wallet card” (PDF) so that you don’t have to remember all the potential commands.
If you don’t travel a lot for business, it might seem strange that you could arrive at the airport and not know which airline you’re on, but the reality is I’ve had that experience myself.
Tripit just keeps getting better.
Published on Wednesday, October 3 2007
Ok, first off, I apologize for the Travel 2.0 title. I know we’re all a bit tired of the 2.0 meme by now, but you can bet that somewhere both of these have been described as Travel 2.0 companies.
I written before about both Dopplr and Tripit but never specifically to compare the two. Both track information about your travel as well as the travel of your friends, in order to let you know when you and your friends will be in the same place at the same time.
Well, next week I’m headed to Chicago for the Forrester Consumer Forum, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to compare the use of the two sites in relation to that trip. All the images below are thumbnails, click on them to see full size.
If you just want the conclusion?: The fight’s not over yet, but Tripit has become more consistently useful to me. Dopplr’s facebook app and existing userbase is all that keeps me there at the moment, and that is an advantage easily lost.
Read more…
Published on Tuesday, September 25 2007
As a consultant who travels a fair amount, this device gets my vote as the single most important discovery this year:
When you’re at a conference (I’ve been at both Ajax World West and Garnter Open Source / Web Innovation Summits in the last week) or in an airport, electrical outlets are at a premium. There are countless web 2.0 knowledge workers wandering the halls seeking power. (Ampires, or wherevolts).
This little device turns that moment of potential conflict – where you spot an outlet but all the available sockets are in use – into a moment of collaboration. (In case it isn’t possible to tell from my hotel room photograph, this translates a single three-prong outlet into three. Simply approach the user of one of the existing outlets and ask to unplug them for an instant – they get to stay plugged in, you get to plug in, and you get one bonus plug for a third person or a second device.)
It’s “just good enough” – carrying a real powerstrip with fault protection, etc. would be better, from the point of view of protecting your laptop – but hey, you were plugged directly into the socket already, so this doesn’t make things worse.
It’s small enough to put in your computer bag and travel without problems.
It’s cheap enough that if you leave it somewhere by accident you can just go buy another one.
It’s even in RSS orange.
