Web Thoughts

Where is my Travel 2.0? – Part 3: Users Add Value

domi — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:11:08 +0000

In the first two parts of the “Where is my Travel 2.0?” series I talked about the long tail aspect and data-drivenness of online travel applications. In my today’s post I’ll write up some thoughts on Tim O’Reilly’s notion of:

Users Add Value

So this means that we need to get users to contribute, right? That obviously is an old hat but many of the mashed-up and meta-search sites clearly lack the ability to efficiently harness user contributions – which doesn’t have to be a bad thing per se, especially if we look at all the community 2.0 (trademark someone?) stuff being implemented lately in an reactive act of adoption.

Social Networks

It’s not clear at all how websites that implement relationship-centered friendship systems (which means they are projecting and extending the offline social networks of their users onto their database servers) will automatically be enabled to harness these relationships by means other than just enhancing the stickiness of the application. The basis of this doubt is the predominance of object-centered sociality, which has been depicted by Jyri Engeström (see his blog post and presentation) the founder of Jaiku.

Self-Interested Users

Another assumption that plays into the realm of object-centered sociality is that the majority of users (still) is self-interested. The main difference between services like delicious or flickr and travel communities is that the former were not primarily designed as a communication/collaboration tool. Reviewing hotels, trips or the like does not help me getting my things done, but is meant to help others in the first place. I don’t get an immediate value from reviewing like I get when tagging my bookmarks online at delicious. Participation is not intrinsic to the application.

Cognition Problems and the Wisdom of Crowds

Most problems addressed by communities that feature rating, ranking and review mechanisms are essentially cognition problems: What are the options? These almost always translate into decision problems: Where should I go? Which hotel should I pick? – and so on. In his book “The Wisdom of Crowds“, James Surowieki emphasizes the difference between such problems that people have to deal with within social settings. He suggest classifying them into following categories: Cognition or decision problems, coordination problems and cooperation problems. (David Pollard summarized these three types of problems nicely in a blog post back in 2004)
Surowieki notes that

[...] collective solutions to coordination and cooperation problems are not like the solution to cognition problems. They are fuzzier and less definitive. These solution tend to emerge over time, rather than beeing the product of a single collective decision. (emphasis mine)

Basic examples for coordination and cooperation problems of travelers include, for instance, the manifold side effects of group travel or situations where there is a high excess demand for a certain resource (e.g. hotel or flight).

Conclusions

Today’s travel communities do a great job at utilizing “their members’ need to get something off their chests” for helping users solve cognition problems. But they don’t address problems that affect groups as a whole and for which combined solution are needed. They rely on the user’s unselfishness but don’t aim at cooperation problems where a collective interest of such a kind is a requirement anyway. I am not aware of any travel website where a self-interested user gains immediate value by contributing to the collective wisdom. This is why I fancy some kind of project management tool for travelers where capturing and valuing past experiences directly and transparently translates into additional value for future travel planning – how this should work out in detail? Sly old dog…

PS: Did you have a look at VibeAgent lately? What do you think?

List of Travel 2.0 and Social Travel Sites by Mashable

domi — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 17:06:12 +0000

Today Jordan Chark published a list with 75+ US travel sites at Mashable. He recently wrote a similar post called Travel Hacking: Essential Sites for Summer Travelers. I link to these instead of updating and enriching my own List of Travel 2.0 and Social Travel Site.

Note: Thanks to Jordan’ s diligence and his post SHOPPING SPREE: 18 Sites for Social Shopping & Deals the same cost-efficient updating mechanism could be applied to my List of Shopping 2.0 and Social Shopping Sites, but that would be too much of resting on laurels of others.

Where is my Travel 2.0? – Part 2: Data is the Next Intel Inside

domi — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 22:52:03 +0000

In my last post I maundered about potential properties of the eTourism’s Long Tail. Today, as promised, I will extend the discussion (actually it’s a monologue still) to another aspect of Web 2.0 Design Patterns, more precisely to what Tim O’reilly refers to as Data is the Next Intel Inside, meaning that most web 2.0 applications are essentially data-base driven. O’reilly emphasizes that the challenge here is to create a unique, hard-to-recreate source of data.

Mashups and Meta-Searches

Price comparison and booking sites have a hard time to accomplish this since their USP generally is their ease of use (e.g. a fast and fancy AJAX-interface) and the sheer amount of data that can be compared. However, that data is being pulled from external sources most of the time and a state-of-the-art interface doesn’t really pose a insuperable entry barrier these days. This applies to mashed-up interfaces as well. If there is no additional data added in the process of mashing and therefore no other sustainable value created than the way the emerging results are presented you should better do some cool searching stuff.

Recommender Systems

On the other hand, web usage data can be tremendously valuable for marketing research. But this layer of information doesn’t easily translate into immediate value for the users – at least as long as there is no recommender system implemented that can harness these usage patterns and relay it to the users (or even social interaction patterns, if the site implements some kind of friendship model). However, recommender systems become truly powerful first when combined with data that reflects users’ unbiased preferences acting as fixed points to tie the fuzzy data mining algorithms to. Another thing about those systems is that they help driving the demand down the tail by enabling people to find their niches more easily. Moreover, like Chris Anderson points out, in combination with an increasing variety on the supply side the demand curve flattens out.

Bring Sexy Back!

The classic approach for travel and shopping sites looking to enhance their data is to drive people into reviewing, ranking or rating – or even creating new assets, which on the other hand bears the danger of introducing inconsistencies into the data-base.

If I think of unique, hard-to-recreate source of data the word that crosses my mind first is the word “unsexy” (a germanized Anglicism meaning “not sexy”). In a perfect 2.0 world the uniqueness of a data-source should not be based on assets in certain data-bases but on the way the data is humanized. As I mentioned, recommender systems are most powerful when harnessing direct user contributions (voluntarily revealed preferences) and web usage profiles – but what makes them smart is the way they combine these two realms and the way they draw conclusions.

Now, open those/source your data silos! Give me some APML! And then we’ll see who’s really smart.

Read more in my next post in which I will address item 3 on the List of O’reilly’s Web 2.0 Design Patterns: “Users Add Value”. That post will also feature some nice and shallow background knowledge on buzzwords like social networks, the wisdom of crowds and collective cognition. So if you’re looking for something to impress the ladies (or gents), stay tuned.

Where is my Travel 2.0? – Part 1: The Long Tail

domi — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:49:55 +0000

Unsurprisingly, people are using the web more and more for virtually anything including of course travel and holiday planing and booking. For example in Germany

As information and booking medium, the Internet is becoming more and more important for the tourism sector, too. At the beginning of 2007, 39% of Germans had already used the Internet to search for information on holidays – almost three times as many as 6 years earlier. And even though there are clearly less internet bookers than information seekers, the growth of bookings through the internet is very impressive. With 19% having already booked online, the number is almost 5 times as high as in 2001. (The 37th Reiseanalyse RA 2007)

And equally unsurprising there are new travel web sites springing up every day ~~claiming~~ trying to ~~monetize~~ help people getting where they might never thought they want to go on our crowded planet while paying close to nothing.

And of course all these are immensely web2.0-ish, aren’t they? Let’s recall what the godfather of everything that exhibits a network component, Tim O’Reilly, defined as being Web 2.0™

The Long Tail
Data is the Next Intel Inside
Users Add Value
Network Effect (by default)
Some Rights Reserved ™
The Perpetual Beta
Cooperate, Don’t Control
Software Above the Level of a Single Device

Lets apply these patterns to nowadays travel 2.0 applications. I will argue that a travel 2.0 application/platform that will live up to our precious “2.0″ vision must not only incorporate one but at least some of these aspects. For those of you who hoped to read some concluding remarks, they somehow will be sprinkled all over the next posts and I shall draw some final conclusions after I covered all points.

The Long Tail

This phrase has ~~recently gained popularity~~ been coined by Chris Anderson who then went on to serve the fat peak with his equally named book (I won’t charge you for this one, Chris). The concept is not a new one, though fully embracing it’s impacts clearly leads to a fairly new approach for business design.

What does the long tail of the travel industry look like? There are certainly several different dimensions to be considered. An obvious one (which doesn’t solely apply to travelling but rather everything) is the price scale, but I like to call it the Bling-Bling Dimension: This goes from “Gimme ten bucks and I’ll let you camp in my backyard” to “Let’s rent an whole tropical island for 10 grants per day”. Demand can be low (but sustainable) because the offer is situated in extreme regions of the Bling-Bling Dimension.

Furthermore, there is some kind of Freak Dimension: Some folks are seeking for particularly hard-to-recreate holiday experiences: Tree houses, Igloos, submarine boat trips and oil-rig hotels, my backyard, you name it.

From freakiness it’s not far to the Desert Dimension. There are lots of places within highly crowded areas that are scarcely demanded, like my backyard for instance. But there are also a lot of places you simply don’t travel to mainly because nobody else does. The Antarctica, Iraq, the moon…

As I write (and you read) this, there may be more and more dimensions and patterns of complexity popping into our minds, but for now I’m happy with having articulated at least three obvious ones. If you got some more – let me know. My next post will then be about what Timmy calls “Data is the Next Intel Inside” and I refer to as the user-powered data-drivenness of long-tailed web thingies. Very 2.0…

List of Shopping 2.0 and Social Shopping Sites

domi — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 11:31:38 +0000

In my previous post I enfranchised my travel bookmarks. Today comes the day of deliverance for all shopping bookmarks. As before, the list is not very well structured and I do apologize for that. A nice way to sort it would be to classify the sites as alternative product search mechanisms in one of the following categories (as suggested here):

Product, Price, Brand & Seller Comparison Shopping Engines
Deal Finders, Bargain Hunter & Discounted Shopping Engines
Social Shopping, Product Sharing & Recommendation Engines
Shopping Wikis, Buyers Reporting & Shopping Guide Engines
Consumer Reviews, Product Ratings & Consumer Guide Engines

Fresh

Fashion & Style

Unsorted

Deal Finder

Rate your socks off

List of Travel 2.0 and Social Travel Sites

domi — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 17:38:47 +0000

For some time now I’ve been haphazardly bookmarking travel sites and – since we are where we are and when we are now – most of them can frivolously be slapped with a “web 2.0″ tag. As I haven’t seen many compilations on that topic I’m hereby ingenuously giving birth to yet another 2.0 weblist (gosh!). Please comment sweepingly and intensely (as you always do) since this list is obviously quite unformed and fragmentary and I’d love to see it being evolved with your help (for the sake of the crowded planet).

Update: I should note that most of the items below I’ve discovered while browsing similar lists on other blogs. For example here, here and there and many, many other places.

Communities – Wikis – Ratings/Reviews – Mashups

Booking

Miscellaneous

Travel Together

Travel videos

German

Application

domi — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 11:54:00 +0000

I am one who believes that one of the greatest dangers of advertising is not that of misleading people, but that of boring them to death.

Leo Burnett

Don’t Repeat Yourself

domi — Wed, 09 May 2007 09:19:00 +0000

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

Nathaniel Borenstein

Freedom to Act

domi — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 12:02:00 +0000

One way to create security is not worrying about screwing things up

David Allen

I’ll pay for you gladly

domi — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 17:55:00 +0000

There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

Robert Heinlein