In order to achieve our proposal, we conducted a web search for similar websites and applications. Several of them appeared to be quite useful.
First of all, after browsing through hundreds of travel related websites, we finally found one that could be turned into a suitable basement for us to implement our own applications. “IgoUgo travel” (http://www.igougo.com/), which has won a “Best Travel Site” award from Webby Award and Forbes.com, is said to be one of the best web2.0 based travel website in the U.S. with around 540,000 users. As a good travel community for users to store and share their trip stories and pictures, it has contributed hundreds of thousands of reviews and photos of everything from cheap eats to luxury hotels in more than 9,000 destinations worldwide. It has built a library of honest opinions, tips, and experiences that could not be found in any guidebook. The reviews and photos are expected to spark users’ wanderlust and help them to plan their next adventure, and hopefully to inspire them to share their own experiences. This kind of a robustly growing site with user generated contents and contribution is just what we look forward to achieving. Moreover, we would like to develop it into a travellers’ community and network as well as a space for individuals to display their personal homepages. On the basis of this virtual community, we would like to integrate several applications to enhance its performance and services.
Another interesting and useful application we picked is called “Find My Friends”, which is a free mobile application allowing users to easily locate their friends and family from smart phones. Adding a friend to the name list is quite easy – just send a request to see their location. Once a friend accepts using the Find My Friends app, users will then be able to see that friend’s location on a list or on a map. Users can also choose to share their location for a limited period of time with only a selected group of friends. We found this Find My Friends application really useful in a sense that we are considering integrating a mobile application which would help travellers find and keep track of their travelling companions when they’re on a trip together. Hence applications of this kind can actually bring great convenience to our virtual community.
To achieve our requirements, we designed a social media based GO2GETHER platform. The platform will serve both individual travellers and travel service providers. On the user side, the functions can be mainly divided into two parts, as “Before Travel” of a web application and “In Travel” of a mobile application.
“Before Travel” is web2.0 based website which focuses on traveller community and travel planning. It is mainly composed of a “g2Space” integrated application which is an enhanced blog system embedded with travel journals, recommendation system, rating and ranking system, photo gallery and my video to record and share “What to see”, “What to eat”, “What to think”, “What to feel” and “Where to stay” during trips. In addition, users can generate their own travel plan by simply selecting start date, stay period and destination. The system will also list travel plans of users’ friends as well as other users’ plans with the same destination.
The other important part is “In Travel”, which is realized with a mobile application mTravel. This application is not only a mobile client for viewing or updating contents on the website and showing information of destination such as weather, traffic condition, etc., but also provides a nice function of locating group members’ positions worldwide. Once members launch the mobile application, their current positions will be updated in the system. So that members in this system can easily trace each other. There is a wonderful additional benefit of this function. When users randomly notice that some of their friends are in a certain place from where they intentionally want to buy some souvenirs, they can contact with those friends and ask them to help purchasing. Of course, for the concern of privacy, the position sharing function is permitted to switch off and on at any time by users themselves. The mobile application mTravel also includes a voice messaging function with which users can send/receive messages or broadcast to selected member(s) in terms of communication. Its operation experiences should be just like walkie-talkie.