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!

Below are highlights of the changes introduced, and here’s a video demo of the changes.

A big thank you to our development team who have worked for the past 3 iterations (6 weeks) on this functionality. It was a complex task and covered some tricky parts across our website (user registration/sign on / profiles) and some even trickier challenges wrestling with Facebook’s API.

Here’s a roll call of some to the significant changes we made to lonelyplanet.com

• New and existing users can connect their Lonely Planet account with their Facebook account at sign in and from within their profile management screens.
• When connected with Facebook anything they do in Thorn Tree or groups will be pushed out to be visible on Facebook to your network. Like this!

• Users registering with Lonely Planet the original way now have an option to opt in to our Comet and special offers newsletters. This used to be a separate form – since combining these we have seen a distinct uplift in Newsletter sign ups.
• We now have pagination in our Blogs we Like pages, to accommodate the ever growing content from our equally growing community of bloggers.
• We added links from the global footer to a ‘Follow Us’ page – promoting our Flickr, Twitter and Facebook streams.

Cheers
Katie
Global Website Manager

You may not know that we release improvements to our website every 2 weeks, and I would like to share these changes with you each fortnight.

Below are highlights of what we introduced yesterday, and here’s a video demo of the changes by Matthew Cashmore.

You can now add comments to articles posted on the site. Take the Tour De France article as an example. Cycle freaks it’s time to be heard! Don’t forget to register with lonelyplanet.com in order to post a comment.

If you are already a Lonely Planet member you will be happy to hear that you can now pimp your profile further.

• Last release we provided the ability to upload your own profile picture. Like this!
• This release we have included the ability to embed images into your profile as well as express yourself though some simple styling tags. Like this…

Users of our Groups area – launched last fortnight – will be pleased to hear we have already responded to user feedback and have added the ability for group members to share links within their posts.

We have introduced a the Travel Insurance Widget on the right hand side of the practical information pages, allowing users to get an insurance quote from our partner in one click.

Finally, a little known section of our site, Mapshells (eg map of Italy), has undergone some changes to improve the overall product, with a view to converting the significant traffic from this area into page views to parts of the site we can better commercialise (eg: Shop via sales and Destinations via advertising). You can see these new links to the interactive map, destination photos and the shop on the right hand side of the map of Italy page.