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Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel

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Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel

#11

Post by 1veteran »

_delirium wrote: post #2

I tend to be wary of contributing to crowdsourced projects run by for-profit companies for this reason, because they seem to have a tendency to go rogue once the benevolent management gets changed out, or it's sold to someone else. Many of us in the '90s were burned by the CDDB/Gracenote debacle, which was my first unpleasant encounter with the problem. My experience contributing lyrics to songmeanings.net, which use…

IMDB was originally crowsourced. Started on Usenet.

Can anyone assert ownership over and derive commercial benefit from a data source that traces its origins to volunteer contributors? What would be legally required to do that?

Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel

#12

Post by lostlogin »

haberman wrote: post #5

I spent a few weeks in Europe last month and was really struck by how much room for improvement there is in travel guides. The #1 thing you want to know about travel information is where everything is. If you read a blurb about some attraction and decide it sounds cool, are we talking a five-minute detour from your existing plans or a day-trip? Something that only mildly interests you might be worth a quick stop if i…

Something that has hit me more times than is ideal is opening times. A surprising number of travel guides do odd things like say 'open Tuesday to Sunday, closed 1st Sunday of the month.' At a quick skim its easy to miss the 2 key things, closed some Sundays, closed all Mondays. And unhelpfully the format of the information is often inconsistent within the same publication. Invariably the info is out of date anyway, and prices are considerably higher than the guides states. We usually used Lonely Planet or Rough Guide, but the lack of up to date opening times was a continual pain (out of date prices is annoying, but you can spend more and get in, but if the place is closed, you're stuck).

Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel

#13

Post by srunni »

haberman wrote: post #5

I spent a few weeks in Europe last month and was really struck by how much room for improvement there is in travel guides. The #1 thing you want to know about travel information is where everything is. If you read a blurb about some attraction and decide it sounds cool, are we talking a five-minute detour from your existing plans or a day-trip? Something that only mildly interests you might be worth a quick stop if i…

> One awesome thing this would allow is for people to create and curate special-interest travel guides.

I think there's HUGE potential in an online service that takes care of all the aspects of a trip. Right now you have the choice of either doing everything manually (which is a big time sink) or going on a package tour (which is bland and one-size-fits-all). In between you've got a few options like Expedia and Travelocity, but they're more like extensions of the package tour idea than a rethinking of the concept.

In my vision, you'd give it the dates you want to travel, where you want to go, your budget, and access to your social networking accounts (so it can figure out your interests/hobbies). Then it uses the data you've given it along with preexisting curated travel data (which could be based on crowdsourced info, both from previous customers and from 3rd party sources) to create an optimized & customized travel itinerary and take care of all the purchases (plane tickets, hotel reservations, Uber reservations from the airport to the hotel and between sightseeing locations (if needed), tickets for different sightseeing locations, etc.) so that you just have to pay once, to this service. You don't have to worry about when places are open/closed, how long it takes to get between them, etc. - that would be automatically calculated (should be pretty straightforward with Google Maps API access).

Then you'd want to have an associated smartphone app that will (in real-time) display the itinerary, give directions between the different places, suggest restaurants to eat at (maybe make reservations using OpenTable), etc. The itinerary could even be dynamic. For example, if there's an outdoor activity planned and it starts raining, it would automatically rearrange your itinerary as necessary, etc. You could use GPS and/or NFC at museums and other places to play back audio explanations of various exhibits (they already have this at many museums, but you have to pay extra for the privilege and wear an iPod or some other clunky device for the duration of the tour).

Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel

#14

Post by Avshalom »

srunni wrote: post #13
haberman wrote: post #5

I spent a few weeks in Europe last month and was really struck by how much room for improvement there is in travel guides. The #1 thing you want to know about travel information is where everything is. If you read a blurb about some attraction and decide it sounds cool, are we talking a five-minute detour from your existing plans or a day-trip? Something that only mildly interests you might be worth a quick stop if i…

> One awesome thing this would allow is for people to create and curate special-interest travel guides. I think there's HUGE potential in an online service that takes care of all the aspects of a trip. Right now you have the choice of either doing everything manually (which is a big time sink) or going on a package tour (which is bland and one-size-fits-all). In between you've got a few options like Expedia and Trave…

... you mean a travel agent?

Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel

#15

Post by duskwuff »

_delirium wrote: post #2

I tend to be wary of contributing to crowdsourced projects run by for-profit companies for this reason, because they seem to have a tendency to go rogue once the benevolent management gets changed out, or it's sold to someone else. Many of us in the '90s were burned by the CDDB/Gracenote debacle, which was my first unpleasant encounter with the problem. My experience contributing lyrics to songmeanings.net, which use…

> My experience contributing lyrics to songmeanings.net, which used to be a community-run/crowdsourced lyrics repository, not full of pop-up ringtone ads, was similarly negative.

What is it with lyric sites and ringtone ads? LyricWiki went the same way.

Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel

#16

Post by tnuc »

Wikitravel suffered from having ads (commercial) while internet brands did just enough to keep the site running. For some reason applying innovation or new features to wikitravel just didn't happen.

Wikipedia suffers from a lot of issues in terms of the constant edit wars, politics and rules. People who once edited on Wikitravel may run away from the politics of wikipedia. Wikipedia articles will no longer link to Wikitravel but to somewhere in wikipedia/media. Wikipedia will have slight edge on wikitravel. Innovation on wikipedia is mainly limited to pictures and text so any change isn't really. If innovation wasn't happening with Wikitravel it certainly isn't going to happen with Wikipedia owning it.

The only real change with what has happened is that the content that once existed on wikitravel and couldn't be commercialized, can now be integrated in commercial applications/websites.

Very soon the content will be put up on commercial sites whilst they collect further information for themselves. The top contenders at this stage are Google and Tripadvisor. I honestly can't see Lonely Planet getting their shit together, their parent company BBC don't have a clue.

I can only hope that new innovation occurs and winner of this are the users.

Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel

#17

Post by Revisor »

Spot the differences:

2007 - Internet Brands purchases Jelsoft, creator of the succesful vBulletin forum SW

2009 - IB starts selling vB 4.0 despite it being not finished and buggy. Customers are angry

2010 - Internet Brands sues Kier Darby, a lead developer of XenForo, who had previously served as a lead developer for Internet Brands' vBulletin, claiming that Kier had not returned confidential information from Internet Brands regarding the vBulletin software

2012 - After not having fulfilled the promises of vB4, IB introduces vB5. The beta version meets with horror and disgust of the current customers. No serious forum plans to upgrade.

2013 - The once mighty forum's future is as well as dead.

Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel

#18

Post by srunni »

Avshalom wrote: post #14
srunni wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One awesome thing this would allow is for people to create and curate special-interest travel guides. I think there's HUGE potential in an online service that takes care of all the aspects of a trip. Right now you have the choice of either doing everything manually (which is a big time sink) or going on a package tour (which is bland and one-size-fits-all). In between you've got a few options like Expedia and Trave…

... you mean a travel agent?

No, travel agents fit into the "package tour" group that I mentioned above. In my experience, travel agents have provided a one-size-fits-all experience - stale and boring.

Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel

#19

Post by schackbrian »

srunni wrote: post #13
haberman wrote: post #5

I spent a few weeks in Europe last month and was really struck by how much room for improvement there is in travel guides. The #1 thing you want to know about travel information is where everything is. If you read a blurb about some attraction and decide it sounds cool, are we talking a five-minute detour from your existing plans or a day-trip? Something that only mildly interests you might be worth a quick stop if i…

> One awesome thing this would allow is for people to create and curate special-interest travel guides. I think there's HUGE potential in an online service that takes care of all the aspects of a trip. Right now you have the choice of either doing everything manually (which is a big time sink) or going on a package tour (which is bland and one-size-fits-all). In between you've got a few options like Expedia and Trave…

http://plnnr.com/

Re: Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel

#20

Post by srunni »

schackbrian wrote: post #19
srunni wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One awesome thing this would allow is for people to create and curate special-interest travel guides. I think there's HUGE potential in an online service that takes care of all the aspects of a trip. Right now you have the choice of either doing everything manually (which is a big time sink) or going on a package tour (which is bland and one-size-fits-all). In between you've got a few options like Expedia and Trave…

http://plnnr.com/

This seems quite nice. It has a solid UI and is certainly heading in the right direction, but lots of work remains to be done. For example, flight booking needs to be integrated, and a smartphone app isn't available.

They say the service is completely free, which IMO is a big mistake - the right approach is to be responsible for all the payments and then charge the user just one time, which not only allows you to add a fee on top (your primary revenue source) - it removes one more pain point for the user.

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