Nextstop believes that other websites and tools don't take the best or most intuitive approach at getting you information on local hotspots. Founded by Carl Sjogreen (one of the leaders of Google Calendar), Adrian Graham (product manager for Picasa), and Charles Lin, the travel startup launches publicly today with the goal of building detailed and localized guides to cover almost every travel experience. Their tool's killer feature, though, is its smart integration with Google APIs that makes it dead-simple to build detailed and visual travel recommendations.
Nextstop's guides
The core premise is simple: you can read and build guides for specific adventures or trips. For example, since I'm (very) new to the San Francisco Bay area, I can read up on Hidden San Francisco gems and landmarks. I can read step-by-step where I should go, complete with beautiful pictures. If you drill down into a specific city, venue, or location, you can see its location, user recommendations, more photos, places other SF locals have recommended, and more.
Where Nextstop shines, above all other features, is its guide creation and add a recommendation tools. Adding guides is dead-easy. This is because the entire thing is based off of Google APIS.
When you start typing in a place and add a city, the system will automatically find it, pin it on a map, pull photos from Google image search, and you're pretty much done. Add your review (they recommend 160 characters, but you can go longer) and you've just made a recommendation.
Community
The lynchpins of Nextstop are its very strong community features. First of all, you're rewarded for creating guides and recommendations with badges, which reward you for certain actions, and likes, which is a count of how many people have given a guide a thumbs-up. A lot of Nextstop's appeal is based on reputation and similar interests, so Nextstop makes it easy to see information on a user by just hovering over their name and icon.
Nextstop also has a challenges section for creating guides on a specific topic (smart of Nextstop, since they can use this to fill in gaps) and an integrated forum. Finally, everything is easily shareable with an accessible share button.
Stiff competition
To be honest, the space is crowded with direct and indirect competitors like Where I've Been, Joobili, GeckoGo, Wikitravel and SpottedByLocals, the 2008 winner of our Open Web Awards. This doesn't mean that there isn't room for Nextstop, but it faces a steep hill.
Yet we're thoroughly impressed with our first run of Nextstop. Guides are actually quite useful, and there are hundreds if not thousands of guides already built by users, mostly because it's so incredibly quick to create a guide. It's a well polished website with very few issues, although I will say, I really want a better way to bookmark and organize guides I like for later reading. It easily has the community feel as well.
In other words, if you are looking to get the inside scoop for your vacation or want to share your knowledge, NextStop is a smart way to go. It's already made itself a very useful tool. Whether it will catch on is an entirely different question.
More Travel resources from Mashable:
- HOW TO: Use Social Media for Travel Research