We have uploaded a new version today - the major change is that all photos (both travel guide ones and your profile photos) are now stored in Amazon S3. It was rather easy to move our photos to them (well, Guy did it, so for me it was really easy). S3 saves us all sorts of worries (disk space, backups, server I/O and CPU issues) - and the cost is okay too. Good on you Amazon!
Randomly surfing the web I noticed a strange message instead of the Tripup homepage: ” Tripup is gone, sorry. Maybe you can use Facebook instead, it’s very popular.”
It’s sad to see a website gone, or “deadpooled“- knowing the effort and energy it needs to build it.
I found Tripup (or as it was called then TripMates) when I started to work on our project. I quite liked the site and considered it as a fair competitor. Then I read that it was acquired by sidestep, we saw it as a good sign- a well established travel site acquires a travel community.
The problem probably was that tripup never got traction and traffic, and Sidestep merger to Kayak caused changes in the focus (as Tim in the BOOT hints).
So we say to Tripup users: Facebook is very popular indeed, but it’s not a travel tool. Try triptouch.com and you’ll find here most of the features you used to have in tripup.
And if someone from Tripup reads this, why don’t you contact us? Maybe we can think of a way to help your community.
Our march newsletter is out - a tribute to the Simpsons (which as it happens is quite popular here at TripTouch). Follow their crazy adventures all over the world…
And here’s a photo of my very own Spider Pig thingy on my Laptop (Eva was a little bored and got some play-dough thing, she’s quite good with it) -
TripTouch is getting some nice traffic lately - we have been mentioned in blogs and newspapers and even Google is starting to take notice of us. Our own internal stats show just over 350K pages views, while Alexa average this week is 20,923 and compete shows 57,575 visitors from the US. This is a nice increase from January.
We’re also getting much more users than before. Many of those come from the US, Italy, UK, India and Israel (yeah, we’re Israeli - and it helps…).
We just launched 3 months ago so these are very good numbers. Now our job is to keep bringing more users of course…
TripTouch’s office is in Ramat Hahayal - a high-tech “park” in Tel-Aviv, just besides the Yarqon Park (which is a real beautiful green thing).
Anyway a couple of days ago we decided to check out a new place they built in the park. It’s a coffee shop plus bicycle store (cycling is the thing today in Israel). Anyway it’s fun to be out in the open. Makes you wonder why we’re doing a web page instead of really traveling, eh?
This is both interesting and funny - in a recent blog post in blogoscoped (a leading blog on google) we were featured - mainly about our technology and content partners. I told them that one of the annoying things about Google is that many maps are in the local language and not in english - so we didn’t even include the Thailand map in TripTouch for example - it was all in Thai. The fun part is that just yesterday google has changed that and added English to all their maps (or at least some of them - we’ll need to check and see which maps are worthy). You can read all about this in that blog post - make sure you read the update at the end.
Good on ye’ Google!
Today we rolled out a small update. We changed the whole linking structure in triptouch - basically making all our URLs nice looking.
Don’t worry though - it’s backup compatible so old links into your trips or photos will still work!
We have been getting some nice press attention lately - from the NY Times, Der Spiegel, wired, and mashable. So people have asked me - “Hey Ron, where are the links to these cool press mentions?”. At first I tried to ignore, but no longer - we now have a press page. Hopefully we’ll have more and more good stuff coming our way!
Well! We have crossed over the 4,000 destinations (4,146 is the current count). It’s good to see that we’re doing this more and more quickly. Good on you Eva!
The other day, we saw (while walking to lunch) what has to be the world’s smallest dog. It turns out that he’s a puppy, but he won’t grow anymore. And I thought it was a mouse at first, check out these photos: (click on them to enlarge - otherwise the dog is too small to see!)
