So I have been hinting here and there about this “project” I have been working on, so I figured it was time to fill you in on it.
In my free time here in Costa Rica, I began brainstorming up an idea with Casey and Jesse to build an online travel guide geared towards long-term travelers, eco-tourists, and backpackers. We began playing with the idea and started building a prototype of the site. The original intentions was to build a platform where travelers could create their own blogs, post stories, write destination reviews, and offer each other advice in the forums. As the idea grew, so did the workload, design issues, database problems, and in order to make it to a final product, we had to have 5 different applications to run on a single platform. It wasn’t working right.
Solution: We looked at what was going on the the Web 2.0 world today. 37 signals put out a book called Getting Real and pointed out the flaw in conventional web design: “Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors you need to one-up them. If they have four features, you need five (or 15, or 25). If they’re spending x, you need to spend xx. If they have 20, you need 30″. If you look at some of the most successful web developments these days you will notice something is drastically different: “The answer is less. Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to everyone else. Instead of one-upping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try under-doing”. You can see that with such companies as Twitter and Tumblr. So I decided to choose the part of the original concept that I felt would make the most impact on the traveling community, filling a void.
The main focus was the community aspect. A place where people can share their experiences, thoughts, stories, and advice with the rest of the travel community. What better way to connect than through a”social network”. I don’t have to explain what that is because if you have used Myspace or Facebook, you know what it is, and if you haven’t by this point, you most likely won’t care.
So that brings us to where we are now. After trying out an testing many of the possible pre-built solutions out there, we have decide to build our own interface from scratch with “Ruby on Rails” a.k.a. geeky web programming stuff you won’t care much about. So far there has been an interest brewing in the tech-world, and it is not even finished yet, or been publicly discussed, but people know, and my email inbox proves it.
Learn more by visiting the website: BackpackthePlanet.com
and the company blog: Ian.BackpackthePlanet.com
and more about me: BackpackthePlanet.com/Ian.htm
