TravelMuse and Facebook are talking, back and forth.
Many websites enable you to share content and ideas with your Facebook friends. But, TravelMuse's new Travel Planner , unveiled today, takes your Facebook friends' comments about your trip and saves them back to your TravelMuse trip folder.
So, trip planning and sharing become a two-way street.
The geeks at TravelMuse executed the back and forth Facebook sharing by leveraging Facebook Query Language, which allows applications to use "a SQL-style interface" to access comments and posts from a user's stream or profile through other Facebook APIs, Facebook states.
The new Travel Planner, which debuts with a homepage redesign, represents a sea change for TravelMuse, explains CEO Russ Lemelin, a former interim CEO at SideStep.
"We were a content site that had a planner," Lemelin says. "Now, we are a planning site that has some content."
Taking its inspiration from trip-planning websites like gliider, which enable consumers to research throughout the Web and drag content back into gliider, the TravelMuse Bookmarker has been revamped and rendered more interactive with maps and organizational tools.
It has a toolbar button which enables users to save images, web pages, text and comments from throughout the Web to personal trip folders.
"You can't really compete with the Web when it comes to content," Lemelin says.
"If we are trying to get people to use us and not visit anyone else, we are swimming upstream," he adds.
Among other new functionality rolled out, the planner enables users to save Web research about a San Diego restaurant to Cape Cod bike tour on an interactive map, where consumers can create schedules and retrieve related information. Any venue with a geolocation can be plotted on the map.
The maps have a bunch of tools, including a scheduler to organize trips, and Wikipedia is integrated, too.
While TravelMuse has ceased leaning toward a goal of being a one-stop-shop for trip planning as it acknowledges that consumers freely roam the Web, TravelMuse still offers its own guides, which can be incorporated into trip folders.
The whole idea behind the new planner is to make travel research easier so consumers don't have to lug around guide books, print reams of Web pages and email links to family and friends as they plan their vacations.
Of course, the hope is that opening up TravelMuse to the broader Web will lead to a lot more consumer engagement, which in turn would boost page views and the company's media/advertising business, Lemelin says.
Lemelin has a lot of respect for gliider, but claims "no one is close to us" in trip planning because TravelMuse not only facilitates saving Web content, but enables consumers to organize and schedule their research, as well.
Another differentiator with gliider, Lemelin says, is that gliider is a downloadable tool [like SideStep was in its early days] and many consumers fear downloading client software.
So, with the proliferation of travel-planning websites like gliider, TravelMuse, UpTake, NileGuide and dozens of others, are any of these businesses making any money?
Lemelin likens the travel-planning landscape to the beginning of travel metasearch.
"We didn't make any money when we started," Lemelin says, referring to SideStep, which Kayak bought for $196 million in 2007. "There is so much déjà vu for me. Travel planning is still in its nascent stages."
Whether, as Yogi Berra says, this is "déjà vu all over again," remains to be seen.