The purchase gives TripAdvisor more travel inspiration tools that help users discover new trip ideas. Wanderfly, like some of its social travel competitors, moved to a more Pinterest for travel format earlier this year, allowing users to recommend places, add photos and save their favorite spots.

The acquisition makes sense for TripAdvisor. Medros said at Mobilize that TripAdvisor would like to develop ways for people to record their travels in journals and share them with others. And he said the company was also looking at ways for users to get more real-time recommendations from friends and strangers while on a trip. Wanderfly, which has raised $1.4 million to date, doesn’t do all of that but it’s a nice foundation for TripAdvisor to build upon. And TripAdvisor can use Wanderfly’s tools to enhance its mobile apps, something Wanderfly didn’t have.

It makes you wonder if other social travel sites will be able to survive as standalone businesses. As we’ve mentioned, it’s hard to be in the social planning and inspiration market when people just don’t travel that much. I’ll be interested to see what happens to other companies like GTrot, Trippy, Tripl, Tripbirds, Twigmore and even bigger names like Gogobot. It might be that some can survive but I’m doubtful they can all make it by themselves.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Startup growth and the new recruiting ecosystem
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

The reason was simple: the site was dipping its toes in a competitive-but-ineffective market for travel services built on top of the social substrate of the web. It’s an idea that is appealing, but unrewarding; a niche that has failed, time and time again, to produce any truly viable businesses. The problem? There are loads of products fighting for similar territory (Gogobot, Wanderfly, Everplaces and many more) but overall, demand for what they’re offering seems to be low.

Or, as I put it at the time, it was in danger of being the tallest dwarf: a great service in a scene “stuffed with startups who all seem to do the same thing without ever finding much real success”:

Whatever the case, this proliferation of services surely can’t happen forever. Companies with a different take on what “social travel” means, like Airbnb or TripAdvisor, seem to be doing well… but those tapping the social graph for a layer of tips and recommendations seem to find it hard.
So is the reason nobody has won social travel because — essentially — there isn’t anything to win?

No surprise that co-founder Ted Valentin (pictured) disagreed with me. He suggested that a social travel service could work, if it got enough critical mass.

Fast forward a few months and a few thousand users, and the small, Stockholm-based team have taken some time to look at what they’re doing… and they’re choosing to rework it.

The new Tripbirds, which opened up on Tuesday, is a hotel booking site that uses social data to help recommend potential locations. Sign in, connect to Facebook, and Tripbirds will filter the hotels it thinks you’d most appreciate. It tries to make its listings come alive by bringing in Instagram photos to spruce the place up, and you can apply other filters too (normal ones like price and star rating, or more unusual ones like the number of Instagram photos). And it uses data from your friends, listing places they’ve stayed higher in the rankings — although, as yet, it does not determine whether they liked the place they stayed, which seems like a pretty important feature.

In this, it’s not really a pivot as much as an attempt to really focus on one aspect of the previous product — the one which, coincidentally, has potential to be a serious revenue generator.

But will it help the site — which has funding from Creandum, Index and a number of angels — grow? Hotel booking is even more competitive than social travel, and it’s an industry dominated by large players which operate at huge volume and are well-established. The company certainly hopes so, as do its investors, but they are going to have their work cut out for them.

Still, there are possibilities. Hipmunk, for example, seems to have made some impact with its pretty pain-free airline booking service. There’s a lot to be said for focus, and for something smart, simple and user friendly — all of which Tripbirds has.

Right now, I’ll keep looking to see what happens. I still like the feel of using Tripbirds. I still think it’s a tough, tough business. Which means that in the end, I’m left in the same place as I was in March — which is kind of funny for a travel service I suppose.

Photo of Ted Valentin courtesy of Flickr user Eric Starck. Photo of suitcase courtesy Shutterstock user Alex Kalmbach.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Startup growth and the new recruiting ecosystem
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

The New York start-up, part of the latest DreamIt Ventures’ accelerator class in New York, has built a personalized filtering service that ingests your friends’ Facebook and Foursquare feeds and organizes their travel data into stories on a timeline, so you can see where your friends are off to. It’s kind of like video recommendation services ShowYou or Shelby.tv, only this is for travel data.

It may sound simple, or perhaps a little stalkerish, but there’s some real intelligence going on in the background, as Tripl understands when your friends are on the road, more than 100 miles away from home. It then aggregates their pictures, comments and check-ins into a discrete story, complete with Wikipedia information, stock photos and pricing data on flights. For example, my friend Mike was in Toronto on a trip for several days last week. Tripl understands that he’s away from home and starts pulling in all his check-ins into one story. By visiting his story, I can see where he’s checked in, what pictures he’s taken on the trip and what comments he’s left at different places. It’s all put together into a visually appealing package that ends when he’s back at home. Users who sign-up can also get daily and weekly emails alerting them to new stories.

The service will add Instagram any day now and is looking at Twitter integration as well. That’s no small task, trying to determine the identity of friends across different social graphs and ensuring that all their updates, pictures and check-ins on various services can get collected into one story. Tripl is also hoping to add more content about popular locations from travel publications. An iPhone app is a couple weeks away.

Peter Sullivan, the co-founder of Tripl, told me that the new service was developed over the last three weeks as the team of seven tried to figure out a simpler way to engage users. He said the filtering service works because it doesn’t require your friends to sign up with Tripl, but instead just automatically organizes your friends’ travel information into readable stories. He said many beta users are finding that their friends are taking 15-20 trips a week.

“For the first time, you’re able to see where your friends are traveling to and where they’ve been before,” Sullivan said.

Tripl was originally founded by Sullivan while he was studying for an MBA in Stockholm, Sweden. The initial idea was to help people connect with friends, and friends of friends, in the cities where a user was planning to travel, so they could get advice and recommendations from a local. That service, which launched in beta in December, is still part of the larger road map, but the team is concentrating now on the story filtering service to build critical mass. And if it can become popular enough, Sullivan said it could be used by travel publications and online travel services as a form of re-engagement layer.

After checking out the service, I have to say it’s kind of fun. I can currently tell when my friends are on the road by random pictures and check-ins on my Facebook newsfeed or from their Foursquare check-ins. But it’s nice to be able to have it all collected into one narrative, so you can follow along and see what they did. I’m not sure it will inspire me to make trips I wasn’t planning already. But it does get me into the mode of thinking about future travel plans. And at the very least, it’s just enjoyable to see what people are doing, especially now at the height of vacation season.

I like that Tripl doesn’t require my friends to be part of the service to see their stories. Some other social travel services are stuck in that dilemma now because many of the more useful features require your friends to sign-up. And with some of the Pinterest-style travel services, the pictures are sometimes places people want to go to, but not necessarily somewhere they’ve been to already. This is a record of real journeys your friends have been on. This might not be the one thing that provides a breakthrough for social travel start-ups, but I imagine I will come back to see what my friends are up to.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• The 2013 task management tools market

But don’t call it a Pinterest-clone for travel. The site is trying to differentiate itself by using bigger photos, which are largely pulled from its trove of user-submitted postcards from Gogobot’s mobile app. That’s different from Pinterest and other travel sites that use photos often pinned from the web. Gogobot is also connecting pictures to its large database of structured information, so clicking on an image pulls up data on a location, including user reviews, other images, hotel information and other planning tools.

The idea is to make Gogobot more visually inspiring and more of a regular resource for users, who don’t have to be trip planning to get something out of the service.  The redesign also helps Gogobot make better use of all of its photos which were less accessible in the old news feed-based format. And it gives users another way to get into Gogobot’s database of 60,0000 destinations and 8 million places shared by users. Ultimately, it’s still about being a great, personalized travel resource, said founder and CEO Travis Katz.

“A lot of other services are focusing on purely inspiration, but you can’t use Pinterest to plan a trip,” said Katz. “For Gogobot, it’s not just about going visual, but tying visuals to useful information. We are focused on not just giving you ideas but also the tools to take it from idea to action as fast as possible.”

Gogobot, which taps people’s social connections to help them plan trips, has emphasized photos from its launch in 2010 with its passports feature, starting out with a collection of 200,000 images. After the release of its mobile app in October, it’s now getting tens of thousands of images a week from users, most of them uploaded from their smartphones. But in the old design, many of the photos were accessible only when people drilled down into individual locations.

Gogobot follows in the footsteps of services like Trippy and Gtrot, which have rolled out more Pinterest-like interfaces. Gogobot, however, is a lot bigger than those rival services, having recently passed 1 million users. The move to a more visual interface highlights the ongoing challenges for social travel services. Travel is still an activity that’s only done a few times a year so it’s hard to build a lot of regular engagement around a social travel service. Gogobot and others have to figure out a way to keep people coming back between big trips. Getting visual helps address that need but it’s still not clear if that will sustain many of these services with enough traffic and ultimately revenue.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The state of cross-platform media measurement
• How to stand out in the app development game
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

But after a recent update that included the release of a global friend map, the company realized its fortunes didn’t lie in simply spurring on more travel. Why? Because as much as people like to travel, they only do it a few times a year — and that’s not enough to support a business.

Now, the company is pivoting away from pure social travel to more of an international friend-finding service as it builds off the success of the friend map, which has become Twigmore’s most popular feature. Co-founder and CEO Stephen Smyth told me the service grew 220 percent after the map launched in March, with users responding well to the idea of finding a global friend — not just for travel but for all kinds of uses. He said it’s helping people discover pen pals, conduct language exchanges or find business opportunities as well.

Not enough travel

“People simple don’t travel enough and one of the common pieces of feedback was that they loved the (Twigmore) concept but they didn’t have a trip coming up,” Smyth said. “We decided we needed to create a core functionality that didn’t focus on the creation and management of trips. That’s why we hit on helping people generate a friend map and using that to explore their world. They can use that without having to actually travel.”

The friend map highlights where friends are around the world, as well as friends of friends who are on the Twigmore service. Users can message a person and become friends via Facebook. Twigmore — which gets its name from the Gaelic “twig”, to learn or understand — has 4.5 million profiles in its system through its connection of friends of friends. Facebook has the ability to search for friends by city, but most people don’t know about the feature, said Smyth. He added that social travel services are having to adapt to the fact that travel planning is not an everyday activity.

Other services are adjusting in different ways. Trippy and Wanderfly seem to be pursuing a Pinterest for travel approach with more of a graphic, picture-based look that let people get ideas about where to travel to. Gtrot, meanwhile, is shifting to more of local discovery with a Pinterest-style look as well. Gtrot’s co-founder Zachary Smith told TechCrunch earlier this month that almost half of its users were already turning to Gtrot to plan local outings.

“Local discovery as a space makes a lot more sense than some travel specific application that you can only use a couple of times a year,” he said.

New features to keep users coming back

It’s still too early to tell which approach will work. But the fact that so many social travel apps are changing direction seems to bolster Smyth’s point that there is not enough regular travel to power a social travel service. The key will be in what other features and tools these services can provide for users that keeps them coming back on a regular basis.

Twigmore, for its part, is betting that people want to branch more internationally and are interested in finding friends around the world. While that might not sound that interesting to many users, Smyth said younger demographics are more open to finding new friends abroad.

Twigmore, which is backed by $275,000 in angel funding, is still tiny, with only about 10,000 installations of its Facebook app. But if it can grow with its new friend-finding direction, it will further the argument that social travel services will need to expand to survive.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• The 2013 task management tools market

Valentin, unsurprisingly, disagreed. And now he’s trying his best to turn my assumptions on their head by building Tripbirds into a beautiful, smart and highly competitive entrant into this difficult space.

As far as features go, the site — which is going into open beta on Tuesday — doesn’t particularly stand out from rivals like Wanderfly, Trippy or Gogobot. It takes your social network data (that includes Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram so far) and builds a gazetteer, a tip directory, and a Q&A site all into one place.

That means if you enter an upcoming trip — or even the idea for a trip — you can ask people for advice through a simple, easy to use process. I plugged in a quick visit to Cannes that I’m making later this month to judge the MIPCube Lab video startup competition, and the site immediately gave me some feedback on places to go, and offered me the chance to connect with existing friends, or people already on Tripbirds who had visited the area.

But rather than add a vast number of bells and whistles, the Stockholm-based team of seven seems to have concentrated on making a service that feels restrained, careful and considerate. Where other sites feel noisy and flashy, Tripbirds is focused: something that I think could be a massive selling point. It’s still in development, so things are limited — and features like being able to push questions into Facebook, or integration with Tripit would be really nice — but there are many things in the pipeline.

Still, the quiet design means that all in all, it’s a little reminiscent of my favourite social travel startup, Dopplr, which ended up being purchased by Nokia in 2009 so the Finnish handset maker could bring CEO Marko Ahtisaari on board to head up design. Ahtisaari is making his mark at the company, but Dopplr quickly became a ghost town.

The opportunity and approach has been enough to convince a strong team of investors to put their faith in the company. London-based Passion Capital, Nordic VC Creandum and European A-lister Index have all joined Tripbirds’ seed round, as well as a list of angels that includes Soundcloud’s Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, former Spotify CTO Andreas Ehn, Gidsy backer Peter Read and Path’s Dave Morin.

Don’t read too much into that list, however: travel sites have a habit of picking up seed money from globe-trotting investors who visit new places regularly and obsess about the places they go.

Valentin, who has spent the last few years creating local listings sites — micro-Yelps focused on things like Swedish sushi restaurants, for example — outlines precisely what is so appealing about making travel social, but also what makes many businesses weak.

“The center of gravity is shifting from search to social, from Google to Facebook: if you’re doing travel research on Google now, it’s very bad.”

“There have been lots of social travel services, but they have failed to get critical mass. We are hoping to solve that problem by bringing in data from Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram — services where people are already getting content. We can add a travel layer on top.”

Perhaps not the most revolutionary approach, but there is one simple reason there is so much activity around travel: there are many established routes to making money. The most common is the affiliate deal — find a hotel on our service and we get a small cut of the money you pay. And that’s precisely what Tripbirds is doing in the first instance. Over time it may expand into other streams, but Valentin says there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

“The nice thing about that is it’s a proven business model, and to the user it’s useful,” he says. “It’s not interfering with the experience.”

Whatever the case, this proliferation of services surely can’t happen forever. Companies with a different take on what “social travel” means, like Airbnb or TripAdvisor, seem to be doing well… but those tapping the social graph for a layer of tips and recommendations seem to find it hard.

So is the reason nobody has won social travel because — essentially — there isn’t anything to win? Valentin hopes not.

“The thing about Tripbirds right now is that it’s still in beta; it’s a product for early adopters… We’re making it even easier to use,” he says.

“The vision is for people to start thinking socially when they think about travel. As it is, people are already doing this stuff, but they’re doing it on Facebook, or by email. We want to organize that.”

Photograph of Ted Valentin used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Erik Starck

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past
• Pinterest: signs of staying power
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications