Tripmates, based in Los Angeles, is another new travel community. You can add friends, plan upcoming trips, write a blog, review restaurants, hotels and landmarks and exchange messages with other users. All this information is displayed publicly on a MySpace-style profile page, complete with photo albums and Google Maps integration. Once you've completed all the required fields in the neverending sign-up form (please make it easier to sign up!), the experience is pretty good - I much prefer it to rival Gusto.com, which is so clumsily designed that it's practically unusable.
All in all, Tripmates is fairly well executed. Nonetheless, it feels like all these social networks are becoming siloed - once again, integration with other services would improve the experience and provide a great marketing tool (think widgets, APIs etc).
