Social Travel Sites Guide

Trippy is a Pinterest-like, online service for planning trips that has tie-ins to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. It helps people seek travel tips from their connections on those networks and others who have traveled to places they're considering going; it also offers itinerary-planning tools with social features. The interface looks like Pinterest with a visual grid of what it calls "travel boards," image collections from places you like or have visited. The website launched in 2011. Trippy also has a free iPhone app.

Everplaces is a Pinterest-like social network and mobile app aimed at letting you track places you've been or want to visit by category. It launched in closed beta in 2011 and to the public in 2012. The tagline gives you the basic idea: "Create your own collection of places you love." The Danish ​startup is all about location-based tracking and planning. Like Pinterest, it allows users to follow one another. Everplaces recently launched a business-oriented tool that lets people and businesses create mini-travel guides as apps for mobile phones. Everplaces also is available as an iPhone app.

GoGoBot is one of the more popular travel apps, thanks partly to early integration with Facebook. It performs a similar service to Trippy but with a more original interface, well suited for planning trips. It launched in 2010 and looks more like TripAdvisor than Pinterest, with a focus on mini-guides to particular destinations built around user reviews. GoGoBot also lets users book hotels while planning, create photo postcards for sharing, review venues, get "stamps" from places you visit and maintain a "passport" of places you've visited. In addition to the website, GoGoBot has an iPhone app.

TripIt is a social network for making itineraries and travel plans. It provides tools for converting your flight, hotel and rental car confirmations into mobile itineraries. TripIt has free mobile apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Android.

 AirBnB is a major innovative player in online rentals that lets people book space in other people's homes. It lets users create profiles and show their reviews of places they've rented and stayed. Launched in 2008, Airbnb had hundreds of thousands of listings in a couple hundred countries by 2012. Many listings are rooms inside private homes occupied by other people, but they also include full apartments and homes. Hosts and guests publicly rate each other after checkout, which helps with security. It was originally called Airbedandbreakfast and people often still call it air bed & breakfast. Airbnb has both iPhone and Android mobile apps.