Lonely Planet Labs

Lonely Planet’s Trippy

Johnny CussenLonely Planet author

Lonely Planet’s Trippy is an experimental collaborative trip planning gadget and is now available on iGoogle, Android and other mobile devices.

Lonely Planet’s Trippy was featured last year as part of the Google Wave preview launch. Since then we’ve been collaborating with some of the Googlers to produce Lonely Planet’s Trippy for iGoogle, Android and for mobile browsers. The new expanded Trippy services provide you and your friends with collaborative trip planning tools that are available wherever you are.

Organise your trip items, view them on the map, and then refine them into days – creating the ultimate trip itinerary. Share your trip with friends and family, so Mum can vote for the sculpture museum, and the kids can vote for the gelati shop. The itinerary and feedback are then shared dynamically between iGoogle and the mobile Trippy app. Information from Lonely Planet about each item on your list is always at your fingertips, making the possibilities endless!

We got to play with some great tech while putting this together and it was a real treat to knock ideas around with the Googlers.

So here’s the Trippy Tech Recipe

• Hosting: App Engine
• Search: Google
• Recommendations: Lonely Planet Content API
• iGoogle app: OpenSocial
• Itinerary format and export: KML

You can find more Trippy information over at http://www.lonelyplanet.com/mobile/google.

And it doesn’t end here. Trippy is available under a open source licence through a strategic partnership between Google employee volunteers and Lonely Planet. Google posted about Lonely Planet’s Trippy and the Gulliver open source project earlier today. The open source project is available at http://code.google.com/p/gulliver-app/.

Happy trails!