Tracking fellow travelers

Mark Gibbs' Web site tips, plus network applications news headlines

As the Internet inevitably widens your social circle, the list of people you know and would actually like to meet just keeps getting bigger and bigger. But if you and or they do a lot of traveling, finding out when you are both in the same vicinity at the same time can be tricky.

There have been at least four conferences where after the event I found out that online friends had been there and I hadn’t known. An interesting solution to this problem is Placely.

Launched in 2007 and still in beta, Placely is currently free to join.

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As the Internet inevitably widens your social circle, the list of people you know and would actually like to meet just keeps getting bigger and bigger. But if you and or they do a lot of traveling, finding out when you are both in the same vicinity at the same time can be tricky.

There have been at least four conferences where after the event I found out that online friends had been there and I hadn’t known. An interesting solution to this problem is Placely.

Launched in 2007 and still in beta, Placely is currently free to join.

Once registered you create a profile and can set levels of various exposure of your information for your travel schedules, home location, career profile, personal profile, photos, and age for the public, Placely members, extended groups and networks, and immediate network and groups.

Your starting point when you log on to Placely is your Dashboard, which shows system messages, a list of who you know through groups and networks, who is traveling today, who you can meet today, who will be traveling in the near future, your forthcoming trip details, and, what I think is an odd inclusion, a roster of which Placely users are the most traveled (why would I care about this?).

In your profile you can list your personal details (job, education, etc.) and select whether to have Placely e-mail your Dashboard list every week as well as when you receive new messages and meeting requests from other Placely users and when a group approval is required.

On the calendar page you can add the details for all of your trips including the basics (your overall trip outline) as well as your outbound and homebound transit details and specify the level of privacy for the trip information (which appears to override rather than modify your profile settings).

On the MeetUp page you can search for people within a specified distance who might be available for a meeting. Whenever you click on another user’s details you can see whatever information is available depending on your relationship with them and their own profile settings.

I love the idea of this service, and Placely is smart to be obviously thinking about being profitable: They are already using advertising to monetize the service.

That said, Placely has some way to go to be really attractive to what I believe is their key demographic: Business and professional users. These are the people who travel a lot, who have lots of contacts, and who want to “work” their networks.

What’s missing in Placely is Outlook integration (crucial for the business market); iCal import and export; IM support; and, most crucially; relationships with and support for the social networking sites that would feed Placely, such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Placely has tremendous potential and their challenge is how to become such a well-developed platform that they are better as a partner rather than being a service to copy.

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Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.