Jorge Lorenzo is on top of the world right now. He’s a 23-year-old motorbike racer from Mallorca in Spain and is atop the standings in the MotoGP circuit (he won yesterday’s race in Laguna Seca by several seconds, too). But he has a problem. Teammate Valentino Rossi has a better brand. Mostly because Rossi is older, has won season after season, and has cultivated thousands of fans. When I saw Rossi speak last year at Indianapolis fans were literally crying for a chance to touch him. Seriously. Most of us have never seen celebrity like this close up. Photo of Lorenzo’s Twitter sign on his bike taken by my producer Rocky Barbanica — we got a tour yesterday of his pits and got a chance to see the Twitter bike up close and personal. More of my photos are up on Flickr.

But the MotoGP sport has a problem. If Rossi can’t race anymore, like he couldn’t for a month this year because he broke his leg, ticket sales go down. A lot.

So, the Fiat/Yamaha team is trying something new: Twitter.

While Rossi disdains talking with fans online, Lorenzo welcomes it. Posting photos, doing his own tweets, and meeting with fans one-on-one which, over time, will make him a world-wide brand. He also does things to get his Twitter fans to talk, like after the race yesterday he donned a space suit and re-enacted man’s landing on the moon at the top of Laguna Seca’s famous corkscrew turns (last week was the anniversary of the moon landing). Photo by Umberto Schiavella.

But he pushes it further than any other racer on the MotoGP circuit and is including Twitter on his bike (Twitter gets this exposure for free, unlike other sponsors on his bike) and even holding up signs after races asking fans to follow him on Twitter.

Yes, the sport is also using other technologies, like small TV cameras to get fans at home into the race, but every racer is doing that.

Only Lorenzo is really using Twitter in any big way on the track.

I’m noticing this with more and more brands: they are using Twitter to get an edge on their competition in the branding war — I’m seeing more and more “follow us on Twitter signs” in restaurants, malls, and even amusement parks. Are you noticing this too? Question is, does adding Twitter to a brand make it cooler?

To me it does.

Why?

1. It sends a signal to the world that you want to hear from your customers.
2. It sends a signal to the world that you’ll use the latest technology to communicate with them. Many of whom are no longer using email. My son, for instance, rarely uses email to communicate with his friends.
3. It lets you feature your customers. Notice the pictures on Lorenzo’s bike? They are his fans on Twitter. Win-win.
4. It gives your team a way to communicate in one stream all the photos and stuff.
5. It lets you bridge audiences around the world. Look at how he mixes Spanish and English together on Tweets.

But what do you think? What are you seeing the bleeding edge brands doing today to find more customers and build more brand loyalty? I wonder what Chris Brogan would say?

Oh, and it wasn’t lost on the team that about 100 people were checked in at the track on Foursquare. How long before Foursquare has some involvement with race and sports brands? I give it a few hours the way Foursquare’s business developer Tristan Walker has been working lately.

Finally, just in case, they are on Flickr at lorenzo99 and has an old-school website plus a Facebook fan page. But the team tells me that Lorenzo likes Twitter the best. He even wants to visit Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to meet his hero, Evan Williams. I bet he gets that dream. Something about him tells me he’s going to be someone we’ll hear from for a long time to come.

Nova Spivak has been debating with me tonight about how much more efficient he feels news readers are if they stream items down like you’ll see on Twitter.com, or in social media clients like Seesmic or Tweetdeck bring.

I used to agree with him. It was hard to get me away from Seesmic or Tweetie.

But now? I’m a changed man.

Keep in mind that I read about 19,000 inbound on Twitter alone. On Facebook I have 1,800 friends and on Google Buzz I’m following more than 1,000.

I read a LOT of social media. Heck, in the past year alone I’ve FAVORITED 20,000 tweets! (Not counting the ones I’ve retweeted).

So, I’m always looking to be more productive. Yes, I’ve tried Pulse and I’ve tried lots of other readers (I was one of the first to use NewsGator and Google Reader). But nothing is as productive — for me — as Flipboard is.

I actually measured this. I got about 30% more favorites done in a day using Flipboard than I got done in the same amount of time with a streaming reader. And using Flipboard is 10x more fun!

Why is this?

For that I have to go back to my newspaper design class. I remember that early eye tracking research showed that pages that had a single headline that was twice as big as any other headline were more likely to be read. Same for pages with photos. If you put two photos of equal size on the page, it would be looked at less often, or less completely, than a page that had a photo that was at least twice as big as any other.

I won a newspaper design contest in college because of this — my designs made sure that they included headlines that were twice as big as any other and photos that were twice as big as any other.

This might not seem intuitive, but it is how our brains work and eye track research has proven that over and over again. Some of my favorite reading studies were done by the Poynter institute, here’s one such study.

Notice that having large headlines and photos gives eyes an entry point onto the page.

Now, what’s missing in, say, Seesmic or Tweetdeck? That’s right. Any kind of editorial weighting to the headlines and photos are totally missing. Entry points are gone.

Not all tweets are the same. One about Apple’s financial results SHOULD be bigger and more important than one about what I had for lunch today. In Flipboard, which isn’t always perfect because it’s done by algorithms, there is weight and photos and an attractive design.

I’ve come to realize that we’ve actually gone backward in our news media design in the past few years as we’ve gone away from newspaper and magazine-style layouts and toward streams.

One other thing I’ve noticed: my eyes get less strained after using Flipboard for four straight hours when compared to using Twitter’s iPhone or Android apps, or Seesmic or Tweetdeck style apps. In looking why, it gets back to this weighting. Our brains are awesome pattern recognizers and our brains like it when there’s a clear pattern of “look here first, look here second, look here third.” In streams that pattern is gone completely, other than “look at the newest thing first, then this second newest thing, then this third.” That might seem to be more efficient, but it really is not.

Not to mention that a LOT of what value we get out of the world is photographic or videographic.

On tweets you just get a bit.ly link on most readers. Not in Flipboard. That makes it MUCH more productive.

How about for you? Which do you prefer? Streaming like Seesmic or Tweetdeck? Or paginated like Flipboard?

You’ve seen Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic, but you’ve never seen one like this.
You’ve seen news readers like NewsGator, Google Reader, or, even, newer ones for iPad like Pulse, but you’ve never seen one like this.
You’ve seen news aggregators like Techmeme, Google News, Skygrid, Yahoo News, Hacker News, or Huffington Post, but you’ve never seen one like this.

What is “this?” It’s Flipboard.

It’s from a new company you’ve never heard from before. Embedded here is an exclusive interview with CEO Mike McCue. You might have heard of Mike before. He sold a company, TellMe, to Microsoft for about $800 million dollars. Flipboard, the company, has already had one round of funding from Kleiner Perkins and today is announcing a new round of funding along with an acquisition of the Ellerdale Project (http://www.ellerdale.com/).

What is Flipboard? It turns your Facebook and Twitter account into something that looks like a magazine. It also lets you build a custom magazine, either by choosing from Flipboard’s pre-built curated “boards” or by importing Twitter lists. This is a very powerful and engaging way to read Twitter. You can also turn a single person’s Twitter account, or a single brand’s Twitter account, into a Flipboard. For instance, you can follow Techcrunch on Twitter with it and it will turn Techcrunch into a beautiful magazine-like interface that’s easier to read than any other reader.

The differentiator for Flipboard is the design. Lots of touches that make it engaging:

1. Touch an article and it “zooms” to reveal more.
2. Touch a video and it plays inline.
3. Turn your iPad and everything reconfigures, even photos switch from vertical to horizontal formats.
4. Touch “read more on Web” on longer articles and instantly be transported to the original website that was the originator of the information discussed in the tweet.
5. When you bring in your Facebook friends your friends’ photos, status messages, will all be laid out in attractive pages.
6. You can touch to share, favorite, like, or retweet, depending on what you are reading.

To get a sense of how dramatically different Flipboard is from any other Facebook or Twitter client, you should watch the video we filmed with McCue where he demoed the app for our cameras. In the interview he covered the philosophy of this interesting new company, demoed the product for us, and talked about where the company is going.

So, why is this disruptive, or even, revolutionary? Revolutionary isn’t our word, either, but is what actor/entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher said when we showed him the app to get a feeling for how it would affect the content businesses he’s involved in. He’s not the only one, either. We showed it to Wolfram Alpha’s CEO, Barak Berkowitz and he said “it’s one of the most awesome iPad apps I’ve ever seen.”

Techcrunch has covered that in a second post about why Flipboard is a killer app that — on first look — appears very disruptive to Twitter client producers, news readers, and news aggregator/publishing companies. In that second article we’ve also laid out why Twitter and the iPad have set in place the ingredients for a real media revolution — one that goes way beyond other publishing systems and one that further moves our reading behavior away from RSS aggregators.

But here let’s discuss how it works.

You add in your Twitter and Facebook accounts. It builds tiles, or “sections” out of your accounts. If you are an advanced user you can add in other people’s Twitter accounts, Twitter lists, or choose from a pre-done set of custom boards to choose from. More on those in a minute.

You then click on the section it builds after you flip past a “cover” that is made from photos that it finds from your friends and people you’re following on Twitter. The cover itself is pretty interesting, but the meat is inside, so we’ll focus on that.

Click on “Facebook,” for instance, and you’ll see your friends’ photos, tweets, status messages, articles, and videos. Just drag your finger through page after page, er, board after board, of these things. This is your Facebook news feed, but in a way you’ve never seen it before — all laid out like a newspaper. Click on any item and you can see the originating status message and all comments. You can “like” the item, or comment on it too.

How did Flipboard find these things? After all, I have 1,800 friends on Facebook and am following 19,000 people on Twitter and it filters out most of the noise I see on other Twitter and Facebook readers. Well, it has a set of algorithms that are looking for highly engaged items. You know, items that have lots of comments, likes, or retweets. It also has an algorithm that senses photography that’s been linked to from Facebook status messages and it lays those photos out.

When you reopen Flipboard it re-paginates the whole set of boards (you can only display nine sections at a time, which is a major limitation of the first version, but more on limitations in a second.

Along the bottom is a timeline that you can run your finger across to see a menu of all items. If you get to the end of the timeline and want to see more, just flip the last board over and it will go and get more pages for you to view.

LIMITATIONS

This is quite remarkable, and addictive to play with, but there are lots of things we’d like to see Flipboard add. More section tiles, for instance, is desperately needed. I have 25 different Twitter lists of just my own, for instance, and if you go to Listorious you can find thousands of lists on all sorts of different topics, all of which make good Flipboard sections.

Some might wonder why RSS isn’t used. That will be a limitation for some people, especially if you are trying to follow a blogger who doesn’t yet put their stuff into Twitter (naughty!) In reality, though, there is so much that IS on Twitter or Facebook that this limitation isn’t that big a deal. If you find some cool blog you can Tweet it and then it’ll show up in Flipboard anyway.

After playing with this I wanted to have Flipboard on my Android and iPhones. Unfortunately the team has chosen to focus solely on iPads for right now but are considering other devices for the future.

There’s no advertising, which leaves us guessing as to what the business model will be in the future. Mike McCue told me they are looking at new, design-centric, advertising that could possibly fill a page or a portion of a page.

A major limitation is that this is a reading and commenting app, not one where you can build your own tweets or Facebook status messages. I found myself often wanting to tweet from inside the app as I was reading.

It also doesn’t use LinkedIn or Google Buzz, both social networks I’d like to turn into Flipboards.

WHAT IT GOT RIGHT

Flipboard got a LOT right. It shows how you can enter a crowded space of Twitter clients with something that’s beautiful. The interaction design is beyond anything I’ve seen from a startup since Siri came on the scene earlier this year (and was almost instantly purchased by Apple).

They are totally right to bet on Facebook and Twitter. These are the default information sharing systems for most people now and are both mature enough to serve as news sources. I have a Twitter list of world news brands, for instance, that is awesome in Twitter. http://twitter.com/scoblemedia/world-news-brands Lots of people haven’t seen the power of lists like these, but now they will, and they’ll also understand that Twitter isn’t just about telling people what you’re doing.

WHAT IT DID NOT GET RIGHT

There is a lot missing from Flipboard. First, the #1 thing we need is more tiles, or what they call “sections.” Nine is simply not enough.

Second, we need a far better “store” from which to find new sections, er, Twitter lists. Yes, you can eventually figure out that you can search for people, lists, etc, but we need a better way to do that. I wish there were a stronger tie between Listorious, which I find has a very nice way to find lists, and Flipboard, which makes it somewhat difficult to find new lists to make into Flipboard sections.

Third, as a content producer, I’m very worried that this takes too much of the brand and advertising dollars away from the content producers. If I share a Techcrunch article, for instance, I get more credit than Techcrunch does inside Flipboard. That’s not good. Also, they need a better way for content producers to tell Flipboard just how much of the text they are using. Right now Flipboard looks for an RSS feed from a content producer to see if they’ve set full text, or partial text, or headline only, to figure out the syndication rules but there needs to be a way inside Flipboard for publishers to communicate their wishes since I’m sure lots of publishers won’t like what they see inside Flipboard. From a user standpoint, though, I find this reading experience to be unparalleled, so media producers should work with Flipboard instead of flipping out, as I expect some of them like Rupert Murdoch to do.

There are still some bugs. I often see duplication of articles, especially in my lists that follow larger numbers of people (Flipboard’s own curated lists have small numbers of sources to keep them cleaner). I also occasionally see bad text or bad headlines that were pulled in. But those are minor problems for a 1.0 beta and will be fixed, the team says.

THE FUTURE OF FLIPBOARD

The acquisition of the Ellerdale Project, this morning, gives Flipboard lots of new “trending” features to build as well as some strong algorithms to further reduce the noise and pull out great items for us to read, no matter what the list is we’re aiming Flipboard at.

Overall this is an extraordinary iPad app and one that will shake the media world for quite some time.

ANALYSIS OF WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT:

Every once in a while I get an early look at a “killer app.” I still remember the day I first saw Pagemaker (back then from a company named Aldus, which later sold to Adobe). That app, along with a $5,000 laser printer from Apple, was a “killer app” for the Macintosh. Why? Because if you wanted to do a new form of publishing you needed to buy a Macintosh, a laser printer (back then $5,000) and Aldus’ Pagemaker.

I’ve been using my iPad since the very first day and have been looking for that “killer app” that would give me a reason to tell you why you must get an iPad. In other words, an app that would justify buying an iPad for a large number of people.

We’ve seen other companies get close. Last month Techcrunch wrote about Pulse, a news reader for the iPad. I downloaded it, but it wasn’t revolutionary, just a nicer done RSS news reader. Earlier this week another nice news app, Apollo, was announced in Techcrunch, but I quickly answered back on Twitter that I had already been beta testing something that went far beyond what they were offering.

“So, Scoble, spill the beans already!”

The app I’ve been using? Flipboard. See the news article elsewhere on Techcrunch for more details, since Flipboard also announced new funding and an acquisition too.

It does something very simple: it turns your Twitter and Facebook into something that looks like a magazine.

But, don’t miss what’s happening here, because there’s a news revolution that has been born due to Twitter. First, you must see that Twitter has moved from being just for a way to follow your friends to a way you can follow news brands. Techcrunch, for instance, has a Twitter feed that I follow in Flipboard and other Twitter readers like Seesmic, Tweetdeck, and Twitterrific. But go further, I have a list of 216 news brands like the BBC, CNN, New York Times, etc at http://twitter.com/scoblemedia/world-news-brands. You add that into Flipboard and you have the most complete newspaper-style media you’ve ever seen. You can follow just the BBC, or just the New York Times, or just your local newspaper on Twitter.

The problem is that when you see the New York Times on Twitter.com it looks boring. You don’t see the great photography that the New York Times provides. You don’t have an easy-to-read layout. And if you try to read the New York Times along with my list of news journalists or if you want to follow Techcrunch’s staff writers on Twitter you’ll see them all mixed together with all the noise that comes with that. If MG Siegler posts what he’s drinking on Friday night, as he did last week, it is weighted the same as a New York Times article of international importance.

This makes reading Twitter far less useful than it could be and it lays out why Flipboard is a publishing revolution. Oh, don’t take my word for it. I showed actor/entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher Flipboard and he turned to me and said “this is revolutionary.” Then he asked me for an introduction to Flipboard so he could invest in the company (which he did). Nearly every person I gave a sneak peak to Flipboard said the same thing after playing with it.

It’s disruptive to several groups: those who publish media, especially news organizations; those who produce Twitter clients; and those who produce news aggregators.

“One of the most awesome iPad apps I’ve ever seen,” is what Barak Berkowitz, CEO of Wolfram Alpha, told me after he saw it. “It brings to life the real capabilities of social media.”

“It takes a lot of the stuff from nerddom to mainstream,” Gary Lauder, VC at Lauder Partners, and TED speaker. “My mother is not going to read tweets, but she will read Flipboard.”

But it isn’t just the app that makes this a significant new company.

It also is backed by an interesting team, starting with co-founder Mike McCue who started TellMe, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2007 for $800 million. < << http://www.crunchbase.com/company/tellme >>>

It also has already made an interesting acquisition, of Ellerdale < << http://www.crunchbase.com/company/ellerdale >>> which has been building algorithms using semantic technology that filters the real-time stream by topics, instead of keyword strings. Basically, this means that Flipboard has some cool trending topics features and noise control that will come in future versions.

It also has a list of impressive venture capitalists, including Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Google investor Ron Conway, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, The Chernin Group founded by Peter Chernin, Alfred Lin, Peter Currie, Quincy Smith, actor/entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher, and major investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Index Ventures.

But that’s not why I view this as disruptive. It just is plain fun to use. I’ve spent more than 50 hours on it so far and love that it removes most noise from my Twitter feed, makes me much more productive in finding interesting items, and is plain addictive to use. It also makes me feel like I’m reading an old-time newspaper with beautiful design that helps me find important items to my life. Not every Twitter item is interesting and Flipboard focuses on that.

What do you think? If you have an iPad already do you agree that this is a “killer app?” If you don’t have an iPad does this push you over the purchasing decision line?

Louis Gray just wrote an interesting post about how he kicked iPhones out of his life and went with Android. I could write that post too. After all, I agree with it in principle, even if I can’t take the step and cross over the iPhone/Android barrier.

He isn’t the first, either, to advocate giving up your iPhone and going with one running Google’s Android OS. Leo Laporte told me the same thing at FooCamp (Tim O’Reilly’s campout where he invites a few hundred geeks for a weekend campout at O’Reilly’s headquarters). Although Leo was holding an iPhone he told me he is kicking the iPhone habit and going Android.

On vacation I had dinner with Brett Schulte, who is an IT consultant for celebrities. He’s the one who got me on the set of Criminal Minds and is one of those few influencers that companies try to get to push their products onto sets and into actors’ hands. He’s kicked the iPhone to the curb for the same reasons Louis gave.

And I do try. I’ve had three Android-based phones in my hands in the past nine months: a Droid, a Nexus One, and a Sprint EVO. I’ve also tried a Verizon Incredible and a Hero.

All of these phones have some magical features, to be sure. I loved having the EVO be a wifi hotspot. I like some of the apps better on Android, in particular, Google Voice, Google Maps, and Google Buzz. All are way better than anything on the iPhone.

But still I can’t kick the iPhone habit. Why not?

1. I’m more productive on the iPhone. You might say I didn’t give Android enough of a shot. But I completely stopped using the iPhone for two weeks to see if I could get my Android skills up. I still was faster and more comfortable with using the iPhone. More on why in a second.
2. The hardware is simply superior. Even with the weird antenna issue I just like the way iPhones are built. They feel better in my hands and that’s important to me since I use these devices SO MUCH during my day. The screen on the iPhone 4 is simply superior to anything Android has today. Leo told me “wait until you see the Samsung.” Well, OK, but the Samsung isn’t out yet. When it is I’ll try it out and see if that gets me to kick my iPhone habit.
3a. Apps on iPhone are way better quality. Sorry, but the apps I count on, things like the Twitter app, the Facebook app, the camera/photography/video apps, location apps, etc are almost wholly superior on iPhone than on Android.
3b. More app choices on iPhone, especially in games. I keep finding world-class games on iPhone that haven’t been ported yet to Android. I should make a list.
4. I hate AT&T’s quality, but I don’t hate it enough to leave. I didn’t really understand that, but then I started keeping track of how often I use voice. On my phone I only use voice about 5% of the time I use my iPhone. Almost all the rest of the time I’m using it for Twitter, to read news, to interact with apps, to play games, to Facetime with my sons/wife, etc. In non-voice parts of using the iPhone AT&T’s lack of quality of service doesn’t matter at all. Most of the time I’m doing those kinds of things I’m on wifi anyway. To gain better voice quality, which I only use about 5% of the time, I’d have to give up a better experience on the web and in apps, which just isn’t acceptable to me.
5. Apple users tend to use more apps. I’ve been asking my friends who have Android apps how many apps they have. The average, so far, is about half of the apps that my iPhone-using friends have. Also, something else I noticed, when comparing experiences with SlideShare’s CTO, Jonathan Boutelle, was that we both noticed that Android users haven’t purchased many apps yet. That is something I’m hearing from app developers, too, which explains why the best developers put most of their time into the Apple platform and aren’t working as hard on the Android. But to me this is a bummer because the way I discover new apps is to talk to people. In airports you’ll see me stalking iPhone users asking them what their favorite apps are, or online you’ll see me searching through Appsfire.com for new apps. Is there an Appsfire for Android? My point exactly. There is a network effect with apps and Android hasn’t gotten there yet. Will they? I’m sure they will, Google seems to have the same advantages that Microsoft had in earlier platform battles with Apple, but TODAY Google hasn’t come close and that means I can’t kick my iPhone habit.
6. Battery life. My Android phones totally suck when compared to the iPhone 4. My son literally texted with friends all day while at Disneyland (nothing like a teenager obsessed with texting). At 11 p.m. he still had 36% battery left on his iPhone 4 and I had 50% left, even after using it a lot as a camera taking video and photos of the family and checking into Twitter after an earthquake closed down a lot of the rides there. My Android-based phones don’t come close. My Sprint EVO used 40% of its battery on ONE one-hour phone call. Louis says he gets pretty good battery life, but then I started asking him what he did with his phone to get that and he turned a lot of stuff off that came on by default. I didn’t have to do that on our iPhones.
7. Camera features and aspirational advertising. You know, I’ve had tons of Nokia phones with two cameras. I’ve never used them as much as I’ve used the one in my iPhone. Why? Affordances. My iPhone affords using these features. It is easy, and when someone calls me I can see if they can use Facetime with me. Plus, their advertising is aspirational and gets my friends to WANT to try these new features out. I’ve never had someone get a new Nokia phone, call me, and beg me to try out a new feature. I’ve gotten DOZENS of those kinds of calls in the past three weeks.

So, why am I more productive on iPhones than on Android?

It came down to small things that I’ve noticed. For one, each app works more consistently. On Seesmic on Android, for instance, I could scroll to the top of its window by clicking a red bar. On every iPhone app that happens by clicking the top bar. On EVERY app. On Android it isn’t in the same place, or with the same command.

When I want to edit text, I just click and the cursor on the iPhone enters the place where I clicked. On the Android it doesn’t work as consistently. Partly because some of the screens aren’t as sensitive as the iPhones, but partly if you click too long a dialog box asking if you’d like to copy text comes up. Grrr.

On other things, when I double-click columns of text the iPhone works how I expect it to: the text zooms to fill the maximum width of the screen. On Android it often would overzoom so now I’d have to scroll around to read. Add in the extra readability of the new screen and this is maddening, but is a little thing very few people would notice.

I’m sure lots of people will argue with me and tell me how the Android is already superior in all of these cases. They probably are correct: for them.

But I’ve tried it out and continue doing so (I keep my Verizon account and Motorola Droid and I keep playing with it just to see if I can kick the iPhone habit) and for me I’m still addicted to the iPhone.

When that addiction ends, you’ll be the first to know since I’m in agreement that Google is the company I’d rather be in bed with than Apple but for now I just can’t kick the Apple habit and I’m very happy with giving Steve Jobs more of my money because Apple definitely has built the best mobile device on the market today.

Tomorrow? We’ll see.

How about you? Have you kicked your iPhone habit?

View Southern California Coastal Roadtrip in a larger map

It’s been a while since I, well, just stopped writing the blog, reading Twitter, talking on Facebook or Google Buzz, etc, and just hung out with the family. In fact, I can’t remember a time when I’ve done that for more than a day or two while flying or something like that.

For the next two weeks we’ll be hanging out on a beach down in Southern California, just, well, trying to be present for my family. Fred Wilson’s post on the topic made a big impact. Too often I’ve been staring at the iPhone or working on a video to be present for those who I love.

Anyway, see you on the other side. My calendar says I’ll be on vacation until July 20th, but we’ll see how long this off-the-grid vacation lasts. Where are we going? Our custom Google Map shows some of the places we might be seen in next few days.

Oh, and just to tempt me, the place we’re spending most of the time at, Sunset Cove, just tweeted that they upgraded their wifi network. Ahh, getting off the grid will be a challenge!

I’m taking the first real family vacation in years in two weeks (we’ll be offline from June 28th through July 10th). The process is instructive and gave me a chance to try out a new feature from TripAdvisor that shipped this morning:

1. We picked Los Angeles because we have two young children and a flight somewhere just didn’t sound fun.
2. We ask our friends for help. Not enough experience from our personal friends to be much use.
3. We visited tons of sites like Nextstop or Trip Advisor.
4. I posted on Google Buzz and Twitter for advice from a much larger group of people. Bingo! We received dozens of great ideas. I then took all that feedback and laid it out on my own custom Google Map, which, by the way, I’ve opened to the public so that other people can add even more places on top of.

View Southern California Coastal Roadtrip in a larger map

Then I added all the major spots into my own page on NextStop, (please add other places that we should visit!) We’ll add places we want to eat next now that we’ve picked some of the major spots we want to visit.

More Los Angeles recommendations »

It’s interesting that I like the ideas we received from our social network the best. Even better than the professional pages on Trip Advisor, NextStop, or other places. Why? Because many of them were from people we talk with every day or, gasp, have even met at conferences. There’s something about getting advice from people you know something about.

I’m not the only one noticing this. Trip Advisor, this morning, turned on a new feature that lets you see which of your personal friends can give you advice on the cities you want to visit. Boston.com has more info on the new feature, which was done using Facebook’s new social plugin. For instance, using that feature I learned that Brett Schulte is living in Los Angeles or that Ben Metcalfe can give me advice about Los Angeles. That is useful to know, because Brett lives there and Ben worked for MySpace and was frequently in Los Angeles. Now I know the friends to hit up that actually know something about Los Angeles, thanks to Facebook and TripAdvisor.

If I look at the page for visiting Laguna Beach, CA, on Trip Advisor, for instance, I learn that 101 of my 1,700 Facebook friends has been to Laguna Beach. I bet if I ask them what we should do that we’ll get some good answers. That’s cool. I’ve already asked my friends on Facebook what we should do in Los Angeles.

But, compare that to Gowalla’s page for Laguna Beach. This shows me where people are ACTUALLY checking in, so I can get a sense of how popular each place is.

So, looking at it, planning vacations has changed in the age of Facebook. How?

1. We can now get feedback from a lot more people than we could 10 years ago.
2. We have far better mapping and visualization tools.
3. Integration into our existing social networks is dramatically improving (and, heck, five years ago most of us weren’t using Facebook or Twitter to aggregate friends and business contacts).
4. Location-based services are keeping track of what’s really popular.
5. We have far more contacts outside of our personal friends and we now know a LOT about those friends.

Where do we still have to go?

1. We need malleable social graphs. Maybe I want a great sushi restaurant recommendation. Why are all these systems treating everyone the same? They are not. People who have visited five sushi restaurants, or more, are more credible on sushi restaurants. I don’t care about seeing restaurant reviews from people I don’t find very credible on what I’m searching for, so why are these systems showing them to me?
2. We need way better planning tools. Right now I’m planning our vacation on a whiteboard. Why? Because we don’t have really great mapping tools that join in calendar tools and let us move things around easily. Maryam and I are still arguing about dates we’ll be in Los Angeles, vs. Santa Barbara, etc while we’re doing all the other research. No tool I’ve found so far is flexible enough to let us radically change our plans. Also, figuring out what hotels are in our budget and which ones have appropriate rooms for us is still pretty difficult and time consuming.
3. Finding extraordinary experiences is still tough. Yeah, everyone wants to go to the San Diego Zoo. But how do you make that experience extraordinary? That’s where having friends who know the zoo and surrounding area very well comes in handy, but the Facebook feature that TripAdvisor shipped this morning isn’t granular enough to let me know which of my friends are very knowledgeable about the zoo. Maybe one of them is friends with a zoo keeper who could give us a private tour. But I have no way of knowing that (I got a private tour of the White House thanks to a personal friend I met at Microsoft, for instance, and THAT was extraordinary).
4. Location-based services are still too hard to use. Now that we know where we’re staying I wanted an easy way to look at Foursquare’s tips for everything in that neighborhood, but I couldn’t find a way beyond lying and checking in and then poking around. Still way too hard.
5. Making — and sharing — a really holistic view of a trip is very difficult. The tools are too siloed. TripIt knows my flights. TripAdvisor knows my hotels. Gowalla and Foursquare know where I checked in. But none talk with each other.
6. Lots of sites, like TripAdvisor, still aren’t mobile friendly enough. I tried poking around from my iPhone and found formatting troubles and other things that didn’t work. Yes, they have a mobile version and an iPhone version, but those versions are very limited compared to the full-blown site. Kayak, on the other hand, has a great iPhone and an iPad app, and works very well. Plus, many of them are, well, pretty ugly and a bit hard to use. Now I know why apps like Foodspotting are taking off so quickly. Photos are important, so are videos which show you around, but these sites often downplay the visual stuff.

How has your vacation planning changed? What tools and services are you using?

By the way, here’s my first pass of all the cities around the world I’ve visited, thanks to TripAdvisor’s mapping feature:

1. Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2. Paris, France
3. Hong Kong, China
4. Shanghai, China
5. Barcelona, Spain
6. Cambridge, UK
7. Tel Aviv, Israel
8. Carmel, CA, USA
9. Napa, CA, USA
10. New York City, NY, USA

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