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Tripl turns your friends’ travels into visual stories

July 10, 2012 | Online Travel

Tripl, a social travel start-up, has run up against one of the main challenges that has faced other competitors in the space: namely, that travel planning isn’t a daily activity. Tripl makes it easy to see all the trips your friends are taking.

The New York start-up, part of the latest DreamIt Ventures’ accelerator class in New York, has built a personalized filtering service that ingests your friends’ Facebook and Foursquare feeds and organizes their travel data into stories on a timeline, so you can see where your friends are off to. It’s kind of like video recommendation services ShowYou or Shelby.tv, only this is for travel data.

It may sound simple, or perhaps a little stalkerish, but there’s some real intelligence going on in the background, as Tripl understands when your friends are on the road, more than 100 miles away from home. It then aggregates their pictures, comments and check-ins into a discrete story, complete with Wikipedia information, stock photos and pricing data on flights. For example, my friend Mike was in Toronto on a trip for several days last week. Tripl understands that he’s away from home and starts pulling in all his check-ins into one story. By visiting his story, I can see where he’s checked in, what pictures he’s taken on the trip and what comments he’s left at different places. It’s all put together into a visually appealing package that ends when he’s back at home. Users who sign-up can also get daily and weekly emails alerting them to new stories.

Get the full story at GigaOM

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