GoAbroad: Travel Journal With Groups
This is the third review in our series of travel applications that offer a journal. For an introduction to this category, including a rundown of features common to all four applications reviewed this week, please see: Travel Journals And Web 2.0.
The most appealing part of GoAbroad may be seen when you first get to it - a pleasing and engaging interface with embracing colors.
GoAbroad quickly sets apart two types of users: Travelers are the majority users, the people who want to discover new locations and share the ones they’ve been to, and Advisors are institutional or special interest users that want to create a group of travelers. For travel agencies, school groups, and organizing types the latter is the way to go.
Once inside, GoAbroad is split into a few tabs to help users navigate their discovery: Home, MyPassport, Travelers, and Journals, and Clubs. Home is more of a welcome page than the home for your identity, but it does have featured blog entries, which showcases the latest travel writing. MyPassport is your travel preferences - users can add in their trips, join groups and interact with friends. Travelers is the tab where users can browse for destinations and find other travelers’ pages. Journals and Clubs also are in GoABroad, but it should be noted that Clubs are set up to provide “experts,” users with a particular way of traveling (such as volunteering, cultural exchange, school groups, and so on), with a forum for traveling, or to schedule events with the calendar function.
GoAbroad has designed their application to be a social one, adding surveys and bulletins to messaging (complete with address book) and groups. Every traveler has a quick link for an invitation to friendship and for sending a message, and profiles have an option to post comments and greetings. Journals too have options to leave comments and greetings as well as an option to create an RSS feed of travelers’ blogs.
The weakness with GoAbroad is that there is a paucity of maps - the very thing travelers obsess over - and that a better integration of maps (there’s a mini mashup on the profile page) could make the social and informational strong points of GoAbroad much better. With that said, GoAbroad is a travel journal that is well suited for the social and cause-conscious traveler. To find this or similar travel applications, there is the Listio search: travel+share.
Previously in this series: MyLifeofTravel: Blog As Travel Journal
Next in this series: Driftr: Recommendations And Travel Journal
Application: GoAbroad NetworkListio Profile: http://www.listio.com/web20/app/GoAbroad-Network/
Website: http://www.goabroad.net
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Tags: discover, find, journal, share, Travel
Posted in: Travel Journal | Respond
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