A change of perspective and major updates

Dear friends, after a few months since we’ve launched TrippyDoo we have learned from the way you use our website several things:

  • as much as you like to share you experiences, you just don’t have that much time to actually cover in detail your trip through posts (which means writing a lot);
  • even if you do have time to write, you may forget to cover the things others need to make a decision of visiting a place or not.

So in order to make TrippyDoo more useful for you we’ve changed the perspective – from just covering your travel experiences, to recommending a destination you’ve visited to your friends and other travelers like you.

This change of perspective had significant implications in the way we’ve built TrippyDoo as far as structure and possibilities we’ve given you to participate in the community we want to get together. To be more clear, we have updated TrippyDoo with the following:

  • Create/edit a trip – you can now edit every field inline, in the same page, without having to open that editor we had for the posts;
  • Second – there are no more posts (yay!:D), but a simple inline trip format with the following components: name of the trip, location, recommendations (i.e. adventure, beach, sightseeing), things you liked/things you didn’t like, budget (how much you spent there), photo & video gallery (import from Facebook/Picasa), Places to eat and Places to stay (just add the name of the rest/hotel, we’ll find you a relevant photo, and you simply type a short review), and Notes – free field where you can add the trip’s story we so much want to read about.
  • We’ve also removed the Groups for now because we felt the need to rethink them and make them better and more useful for you.

All in all, this is how a new trip is looking right now: Naples, Italy trip. Please go log in and check out your trips and your friends’ trips as well, as we had to restructure them in their new format.

Again, these changes are meant to make TrippyDoo more useful for you when you plan a trip to say Naples, and not just to add your travel stories. Please send us you thoughts, complaints, bugs and the like directly to hello [at] trippydoo.com to solve them asap.

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Two small updates to ease your way on TrippyDoo

Hi guys! This is a quick one – just wanted to let you know that we made a couple of small fixes to help you navigate and share your traveling experiences through photos & videos:

1. You can now add a small description to each of your photos. If you have ~50 photos from your latest trip in Paris, you can tell us what you did & how you felt the city by adding a Post, then simply add a small text to the photos you want to give more explanations, like “this is me with my friend having the best coffee ever” :)

2. We’ve added some titles & links to help you navigate when viewing the photo gallery of a trip. Nothing fancy, just “back to trip/back to post/back to profile”.

Go login & tell us what you think!

TrippyDoo Open Beta

Friends, after many weeks of hard work the TrippyDoo team is excited to announce that we have finally opened the doors to the whole world. This means that now everybody can become a member and bring their friends too, and that content (trips, posts, photos & videos) can be easily shared and discussed.

We would like to thank the private beta testers that help us with going public today. Without your feedback it wouldn’t have been possible.

The open beta version of TrippyDoo has many new features, but most importantly – we fixed bugs on the private beta release :)

What you can now do on TrippyDoo:

- Share your experiences from your trips with your friends, even with your friends from Facebook or Twitter, with just one click. We worked a simple inline edit mechanism, to save you time and hassle.
- Also, you can easily import your photos from Facebook and Picasa – no need to do another upload from your computer
- You can now add Tips to each of your trips, to let other know what’s not to miss!
- Don’t forget to add reco’s for Places to stay & Places to eat! You’ll thank others for these when you’ll plan your next vacation, trust me
- We’ve also placed a travel status bar in the homepage, where you can share your travel thoughts with everyone around & post it to your Twitter and Facebook accounts too.
- And finally – you can now simply log in with you Facebook or Twitter account!

We’re really happy to be finally open, because know we can share the love with you and together we can built the best place for travelers on the Internet. We can’t wait to hear what you think!

In the mean time the team goes back to work, as we have a lot of cool stuff on our roadmap.

What do you think about our new 404 Error Page ?

Ah, how time flies when you’re a young traveling startup! We’ve been very busy lately with development and stuff, and though we have already implemented some very useful features you may have seen, we still have a couple more that we’re working on right now (in stealth mode, of course).

But anyhow, as we’re concentrating efforts in improving TrippyDoo’s usability and strive to make it less buggy (thanks for all your feedback by the way!), we though that, well, we should really have a nice little error page as the ones coming from the platform we are using are not actually that… friendly :-|

So we really hope you’ll not see this page very often, but hell! We love it so much that we wanted to show it to you all:
404As always, Max is the one to blame ;)

What is a trip, and why do we need posts?

Talking to recent TrippyDoo members made me realize that… well…  we’ve been so busy with development and all that we forgot to explain how it works :-| But then again, this is why sites launch in private beta, and this is why we’re watching people interact: to understand what needs to be fixed, communicated, difficult to use, and so on.

TrippyDoo was designed to be the place for experiential traveling, that is telling your stories from your trips, adding photos and videos, interact to help each other and of course, travel more.

So what is a trip, but a collection of traveling experiences? Therefore, the Trip on TrippyDoo is only a title & location that you can easily introduce.

Then each trip can have many posts, i.e. the experiences you gather in a trip somewhere (places you see, people you talked to, dreams you fulfilled).

Photos & videos are uploaded for each post  to visually show people what you are talking about. They are visible  in the post page, but also in the trip page (which is like a folder for your experiences).

For all you people that don’t have a TrippyDoo account (yet!:D) the trip looks like this:

trippydoo-trip

Please feel free to comment and tell us what you think. We’re giving T-shirts to people that help us with the feedback, however they are still in the design process…

TrippyDoo – Private Beta launch today

We’ve launched TrippyDoo today! The first batch of invites were sent just a few hours ago, and we’ve been busy since collecting the feedback, answering questions, and thanking people for taking the time to report bugs.

But now it’s weekend, and TrippyDoo means traveling & fun ! So go on, discover new  and interesting places. We’ll be here, fixing TrippyDoo here and there, and trying to make traveling easier.