One logical use case for location data are travel communities.
Most people like to know a bit about their future travel destination, get some insider tips from travelers who have been there before and are looking for general advice about the area. Reading travel blogs or travel communities can provide an often subjective, but yet informative and interesting view on events, places and sights.
And especially the back-packing kind of traveler is very open to meet and stay in contact with other travelers world-wide - and while Social Networks like Facebook or Friendster can offer a certain way to stay in contact, community websites especially aimed at this crowd are often better at catering for their specific needs.
Last but not least those poor people who stay at home are often interested in the whereabouts and adventures of those who manage to see new places - and the blogging and picture sharing functions of travel communities offer a way to keep them informed without having to use long CC: lists by email.
A lot of pages are crowding this space and just while surfing half-idly I managed to pick five interesting contenders in this space:
VirtualTourist.com is the grand-daddy of travel communities. Around since last millennium the site managed to gather reviews, travel tips and further information for almost every possible tourist spot on this planet - they estimate roughly a million members and almost two million travel trips. While this might sound like only two tips per person, they might be counting a lot of dead accounts.
TripTracker.net seems to be quite a new kid on the scene with a focus mostly on travel (geo) blogging and photo sharing. The site allows for the upload of GPS data and attempts to match the geo data with the photo data. While there might be some travel tips hidden within the travel journals, the main focus is clearly a travel blog/photoblog in this very beautiful service.
The Trip Planner from Yahoo! Travel is a bit sad. In every corner there are little moments of greatness, but all in all it looks like a bland corporate (and older) version of TripTracker.com. Given how much I like the other location services by Yahoo I really wanted to like this. But their lackluster integration of other Yahoo services leaves a lot to be desired - especially the fact that their Flickr integration is so halfhearted and doesn't use the location data and the timestamps of the photos shows that this product doesn't seem to get much love. On the upper hand - it is easy to use and navigate and I'd recommend it to non-geeky, mainstream kind of users.
TripSay claims to be the holy grail of travel communities - I couldn't find much more than a few screenshots and a description on Web Worker Daily, though.
The last but certainly not least mention goes to Dopplr which is aiming more at the business travel / conference crowd and is very well integrated with tools like Flickr and Upcoming. Their focus is mostly on getting people to re-connect on business trips and they also offer some travel tip functionality. Given their integration with web services and the clear, beautiful interaction design, it is not a surprise that Dopplr soon became the deserved favorite of the web crowd.
Basically all those web pages have their merits and their target group - Dopplr is great for their business trip / conference folks, TripTracker is a good place to keep a travel (photo) blog, VirtualTourist looks like a perfect place for backpackers and the Trip Planner is for the less web-savvy mainstream folks.
; "Wired GPS-Issue")