There’s a nice review of TripTouch in an Israeli web site (Israel21C). They also have a nice photo of Gil and me. I like this quote -
“Launched in February this year, and still in beta mode, several thousands of people are already and traveling with TripTouch at their fingertips. Will you be next?”
In the past few weeks we have focused on SEO - making the TripTouch site better for Google… It’s not easy doing this correctly - because sometimes the usability can get hurt - it’s a delicate game between a good site and a site that will rank good in Google. Obviously our aim is to never hurt the usability of the site - TripTouch is first a site that should be useful to our users.
In any case the Travel market is a very tough one - even long-tail travel keywords are usually competitive…
There’s a cool blog post in Oogiot about TripTouch - a company ’spotlight’ as they call it. I think it’s a good read if you want to learn more about our company. But it’s hebrew, so it won’t suit everyone 
We have just released the TripTouch travel toolbar. It’s a quick and easy way to access TripTouch from your browser. It includes the TripTouch widget, links to the site (your profile, friends, trips, etc.) and some other cool gadgets (like radio and weather). Try it out!
The toolbar has been developed on top of the Conduit Platform. These guys are cool!
We now have an easy way for you to add our widget to your site or blog. You can follow the instructions in this page if you want.
In our personalized-pages (i.e. NetVibes or iGoogle) widget, your location is set automatically (by your IP address). You have the option to change it of course, and also to ‘fix’ your location. However for most sites this is not very good - if I have a site about London, for example, I want the widget to always display London, right? and not the visitor’s city. So in our new widget, when you set it up you can choose the location. Currently you have to enter the location-ID, which is our internal city number. You can find the number for your city here.
In an interesting move, TripAdvisor acquires VirtualTourist (and also OneTime). VirtualTourist is one of the oldest and largest travel community sites, all user-generated. Interesting indeed…
Although our UWA-based widget works on iGoogle, we decided to do a ‘native’ iGoogle gadget as well, for several reasons - it works better (UWA is great, but it’s not 100% perfect), and it allows us to submit the gadget to more directories, and more importanly - widgetbox, which will hopefully work based on the new code.
Anyway, you can try adding it to your iGoogle page with this link. It looks a bit different and works a bit better than before.
Here’s a link I really liked - TripTouch is mentioned in a long (40+) list of useful mashups:
Following a post in Mashable, we found a small bug in the widget - sometimes states cannot be changed. Oops! Anyway now it is fixed.
We also added another small option - to ‘fix’ your location. This means that next time you load the widget (or next time you login into netvibes) you’ll see the same location, and not the automatic location that you are in.
Today we’re happy to release the TripTouch travel widget. We have built a widget for personalized pages (iGoogle, netvibes).
The widget includes all our content and services - you can the travel guide + photos, accommodation, attractions, restaurants, events, travelers and utilities. All in one easy to use widget, which automatically finds your location.
We have used Netvibes’ UWA to build this widget, which worked out pretty well.
The widget can also be placed in your web page or blog. We can offer revenue-share (on bookings done via the widget - event tickets, accommodation, restaurant booking, etc.).