Geojoey: super-charged travel experience

By Vivek | November 17th, 2006 at 12:02 pm ET         

Geojoey is the best travel experience site I have ever come across. The speed with which you can browse, view, and learn from people’s travel experience is just amazing. Before I got ahead with more details about the site, I want to mention that the complete site is developed by just 2 people based out of Seattle - Mark Maunder and his wife Kerry Boyte. Mark and Kerry have till date launched 4 startups including Workzoo which was bought by Jobster last year.

Geojoey, like Netvibes, is a ajaxy web application consisting of just one page. When you bring up Geojoey, it maps the newest travel experiences add by the users onto Google Maps in the left pane, and experience details on the right. After that when you move your mouse over any of vote-bubbles, experience details instantly get refreshed on the right pane. And if you move your mouse over any travel experience on the right, icon on the map belonging to that experience will move that helps you easily locate the position on map. Once you have registered at Geojoey you can vote, comment, digg, reddit, and add the URL for the travel experience to your del.icio.us account. You can also filter your results either in the local or the global view and view experiences that are most popular, most discussed, ……..

If you want to search at Geojoey you can perform the regular address search or you do a landmark(like historic, monument,…) search by country. Geojoey has an impressive landmark search engine with and index over 8 million landmarks worldwide. Geojoey also provides a tag cloud that shows tags related to your current map view and enables you to quickly filter down results by your interest.

Geojoey enables users to add their use experiences. Along with the regular information that you can add about your travel experience, you can upload photos using the ajax in-page photo upload tool, and upload videos via Youtube. To better capture the travel experience, Geojoey has developed technology to enable freehand drawing onto the Google Maps. And if you are a GPS user, you can import your GPS track instead of drawing on the map.

You can make geofriends easily by inviting other Geojoey users or sending email invites. Sending invite to Gmail or Hotmail or AOL users looks basic but is very effective. All you need to do is copy and paste the contacts from your email account onto a text area in Geojoey and it automatically extracts all the email addresses for you. After that you can choose whom all you want to invite or delete.

In my talk with Mark he mentioned that on average people have been spending 10+ minutes on the site and some even spend 2 hours browsing and adding experiences. They also been experiencing increased user signup rate as the word is spreading around. I think Geojoey can certainly shake things up in the web travel experience world.

Links:
Geojoey