Yahoo to get up close and personal

Some good blog fodder from today's Yahoo 2009 preview with developments centred on relevancy, open internet and social media.

What does it mean? The search giant is taking those cornerstones and applying them across its new homepage, search, mobile and mail.

The result is consumers being able to aggregate search, mail, social networking sites and anything else targeted and relevant to them in one place.

The new homepage (currently in beta) enables users to plug in applications such as eBay and flickr from a library. Search developments include much richer, relevant results as well as anticipating what consumers are trying to find. The search service is also being opened up so developers and other companies can use it within their sites. And mobile developments include quicker access from the phone's menu and providing users with relevant answers and valuable information.

The thinking behind the developments is the consumer quest for 'return on attention' - a higher return on the time we invest - here's wikipedia says.

Yahoo research shows 68% of us feel it is getting more difficult to to balance life and work, 89% of us have information fatigue syndrome and 63% are worried that if we switch off we will miss something.

So, according to Yahoo Europe marketing man Kristof Fahy the search giant has to continue to do the basics really well and think about new areas such as personalisation, relevance, being open...

The developments look slick so watch this space as releases are slated for end of the year/early next year.

Linda Fox, lead reporter, Travolution

We desperately need a new word for 'Trip' [Tripwolf]

So after two months of private beta testing (we had access here), Tripwolf has finally come out of the shadows to the wide - and scary - world of the discerning traveller.

The buzz surrounding the project will now need to be translated into usage and, most importantly, engagement.

There's no point in having a travel social guide if no-one gets involved in it.

So the public version has a few nifty tools:

• A printable PDF guide which can be created by dragging and dropping content into a widget.
• Content brought in automatically from Flickr, Wikipedia and Youtube.
• Facebook integration.

In addition, the start-up, which has attracted investment dollars (around $1.2 million) from i5invest, has pulled off a coup of sorts by persuading MairDumont to throw all its content into the site - for free.

MairDumont is "Europe’s largest publisher of travel guides" and produces titles under the Baedeker, Dumont and Marco Polo brands.

So while the site is pretty impressive on the whole, TechCrunch raises an interesting point when it says:

And while it features a fairly comprehensive listing of interesting locales, it may have a hard time differentiating itself from countless other travel sites - there doesn’t seem to be anything too unique going on here.

The name would've been a good place to start:

Tripmate, Tripwiser, Tripbase, Tripup, Tripology, Trippert, blah, blah, blah. After Tripadvisor, few stick in the memory. This is not a good thing...

Anyway, let's see how they get on.

They have a fancy video to demonstrate how some of the bits work:



[NB: I was interviewed for the Tripwolf blog a few weeks back]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: facebook tripwolf

WAYN saga will run and run and run

What is it about WAYN that it seems to attract a disproportionate amount of attention in the travel industry for a site of its size?

This summarised the - unfortunately - private comments of a senior executive from the industry who I spoke to yesterday afternoon after we published the latest twist in the AOL takeover non-story.

I suspect he meant "size" with regards to its commecial elements, because it does have rather a few users.

But it's a good and valid point to make because the WAYN travel community has come from nowhere to be hailed by some as the best travel social network on the web.

So is it justified?

We will leave that to consumers to decide, but no site seemingly comes from obscurity to become a significant player in its market (think Facebook, Flickr) without something decent to offer users.

From an industry perspective, what WAYN does have is two young and obviously bright frontmen who have ploughed the conference circuit over the past 18 months, spreading the word about the site.

In the meantime the team has certainly done a remarkable job of attracting commerical partners to the site (Lastminute.com, Isango for starters).

It hasn't all been plain sailing. This time last year WAYN was seeing traffic levels take a worrying turn southwards - something which probably didn't exactly encourage its suite of new investors.

But rather than attempt a sale then, when it could have made a fair few quid for its creators and staff, WAYN pretty much admitted that its original subscription model was not reaching initial expectations and axed it, apart from a few key services.

So rather than try something else, WAYN has had another go.

The company certainly has its detractors. Travolution received a string of mystery emails last spring from someone slamming the industry for fawning over WAYN and questioning - with some interesting analysis - its chances of success.

However, as another senior figure said recently: "Their determination to get the WAYN thing right impresses people in an industry which sometimes gives up too easily."

Perhaps that is the difference? In the travel industry there is a certain 'wow factor' about WAYN - in new media circles, far less so.

WAYN certainly has its work cut out in the coming months. There are sites emerging in the US which will absolutely give it a run for its money - and Facebook is not going away.

So - as we revealed - AOL was not one of the companies which has come looking in recent months, but others are clearly interested.

For that reason, and because it has a tendency to do the unexpected (in comparison to others in the travel sector in the UK at least), we suspect WAYN will continue to get a fair amount of attention in the industry.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: wayn aol facebook
social network

A Rising Star looks in other galaxies

Steven Scott of Airmiles, who we named as one of the Rising Stars of the UK online travel industry in October, has a nice little project on the side.

Travelography is a image bank of high quality travel-related photography which Scott is punting to the travel industry.

There are some cracking shots on the site and, here's the user generated content bit, budding snappers can send their own pictures to Travelography for distribution.

Scott says:

"We set up Travelography because we know how tight the margins are in the travel industry these days.

"That’s because we’ve worked in the travel industry for some time and understand the budgets constraints that you work under."

Yes, indeed.

Good luck to Steven and interesting to see travel types having a crack at something else away from the day job.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Obvious to many but nice to have it officially

Mildly off-topic, but we’re here at the Periodical Publishers’ Association annual conference in London today, taking in – inevitably – reams of material about Web 2.0.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects to come out of the day – which travel companies can relate to – is the publication of research about the popularity of social networking and Web 2.0 sites.

The study by Booz Allen Hamilton found 50% of online users visited sites such as MySpace, Wikipedia, Friendster, Hi5, YouTube, Second Life and Flickr.

In the UK the figure was slightly less than the average (41%), while the US (71%) and Germany (73%) lead the way. Germany loves Wikipedia, apparently...

“Contrary to popular belief”, the survey says, social networking and Web 2.0 is not the preserve of young blokes.

Sites such as Wikipedia, MySpace and YouTube have a 50-50 split between men and women, for example.

In terms of age, almost a quarter of visitors to Web 2.0 sites fall into the 35 to 49 age bracket.

A fascinating part of the research (and a crucial one for travel brands) is in the area of user recommendations.

The survey found 50% of users use tips from online acquaintances or friends to make purchasing decisions. In the Middle East this figure soars to an astonishing to 84%...

Interestingly, around 40% are happy to take advice from anonymous sources.

As the power of user generated reviews and recommendations grows, mainstream marketing messages continue to be challenged.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: web 2.0 travel 2.0 user generated content travel reviews

Flickr photos from Summit and Awards

We have uploaded a selection of the photos from the Travolution Summit and Awards onto Flickr.com:

Summit

Awards

In the Travolution set, you can also see photography from previous conferences, Travolution board meetings, and the ITT conference in Oman.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Who are The Yahoo Two?

Apparently there are only two people on the entire planet that know how the new Yahoo! Panama quality index works.

So says Richard Firminger, regional sales director Yahoo! Search Marketing, who spoke about Yahoo!'s new flagship advertising platform to a group of online travel types this morning at a breakfast seminar in London.

The quality index is arguably the best and most important part of the new Panama platform [although we're not supposed to call it Panama!] - a new process to rank sites and allow for a better bidding system.

But Firminger says that the way the system works is such a closely guarded secret that not even senior people in the company know its detail. Yes, just two people...

One of them works in the search department [thankfully] at Yahoo!'s Sunnyvale headquarters in California, Firminger told the bemused audience at the Latitude/PureGenie-sponsored event.

Firminger was clearly in a secretive mood. When explaining that future search results may be displayed using elements from other Yahoo! products such as Answers, Flickr, Maps, etc, he said: "That's not for you, Mr Travolution." Clearly our reputation proceeds us.

Shame his comments have been reported elsewhere already.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: yahoo flickr yahoo two

Advisory board meeting

The last meeting of the Travolution executive advisory board took place a few weeks back.

A trancript of the whole meeting is avalable on the website and a photo reel on Flickr.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Travolution@PhoCusWright Brussels - Where the puck is it all going?

Bob Offutt, senior technology analyst at PhoCusWright, has just used a 15-minute speech to bamboozle delegates perhaps recovering from a slumber after lunch.

He references a US ice hockey player who used to say: “Look where the puck is going.”

Alongside the usual suspects, like user-generated content – “it’s nothing new” – and contextual advertising, Offatt reveals some key areas where innovation is going to lead the industry into what PhoCusWright calls Travel 2.0.

Perhaps most interesting for large number of travel companies is where travel search is heading, or tackling the “large sea content our there”.

The meta search sites – which, in fact, feel like a bit of a dirty word round here today – are popular with almost a third of online users.

But the likes of Farecast and Farechase are around the corner, with amazingly clever uses of tools such as Flash and Ajax [see our Explanations 101 for definitions], while Del.icio.us is also expected to feature heavily as a search tool.

Finally Offatt turns his attention to mashups. The ex-Sabre executive has used a variety of APIs from various sources to create Bobstravel, a fictitious travel service provider that exists solely by using content from other sites.

He uses Yahoo! Trip Planner for guides, Michelin for restaurants, Flickr for photos, Dolphin Dynamics for flight search and Hotels.com’s IAN tool for hotels.

Mind-blowing…

And apparently there are on average 2.77 new mash-ups created every day.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

YouTube on the up and up and up

If internet users hadn’t already realised…YouTube is now officially the fastest growing web brand in the UK, notching up a massive 478% increase in traffic in the first six months of 2006.

Internet research group Nielsen Net//Ratings said today that the video-sharing service had seen traffic soar since the beginning of the year to 3.6 million unique users in July.

YouTube’s growth has also surpassed that of MySpace during the first half of 2006, and will probably continue to climb, buoyed by the likes of Geriatric1927 – a British pensioner telling his life story – getting an enormous massive amount of press coverage in recent weeks.

Was it just us and a some heavily criticised people commenting on YouTube, but the Geriatric1927 thing was actually a bit dull, right?

The MySpace social networking site shouldn’t be downhearted - it still managed to achieve a growth figure of 98% in the first six months of 2006, with only photo-sharing service Flickr appearing between the two sites with a surge in popularity of 131%.

Other Web 2.0 sites, such as Bebo (up 85%) and Photobucket (up 91%), also featured in the top ten sites.

DIY fans are doing their bit as well, helping B&Q achieve growth of 72%.

Nielsen also managed to segment the results by sex. YouTube might be enormously popular but its traffic – around 65% - is made up mainly of men. MySpace is far closer to achieving equality of the sexes with a split of 53%-47% in favour of men.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Geo-mapping on Flickr

Flickr, the Yahoo!-owned online photo sharing service, has upped the game somewhat in the increasingly competitive sector by launching a mapping feature this week.

Travolution expresses an interest here after showering the tool with praise earlier this year when we used it to host pictures from the Travolution Summit in April and our Travolution@ITT adventure in Oman.

Unveiled rather quietly yesterday on the Flickr Blog, users can now “geo-tag” their pictures on Yahoo! Maps.

When a visitor to a slideshow wants to see where a particular picture or set of images were taken they can now click on the Map function and, voila, a reasonably detailed map appears with an embedded Flickr showreel.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution