PlanetEye

January 12th, 2009

New Release - Personalized Matches and Sharing

Adam Bullied: Director, Product Management

The latest PlanetEye release is a very exciting one for many reasons. First and foremost, we have made some great improvements to our existing feature set, fixed several bugs, and made some upgrades to the user interface. Second, it’s only the first release of 2009 - and that means there are many more great things to come over the next 12 months.

I’ve spent a good deal of time talking to PlanetEye users, and I will be reaching out to our community even more moving forward. If you would like to help us out by providing feedback on new features, as well as any of the things we could do to make your experience using PlanetEye that much easier, drop me a line.

Here are some of the highlights from the latest release.

First and foremost, you will now notice ads running throughout PlanetEye. We have a great partner in the Travel Ad Network who ensures the content presented is actually travel-related and will benefit PlanetEye users.

We will be slotting them in to a couple of different places as we go to get a feel for what works.

Personalized Matches

One of the areas we have been spending a great deal of time on improving is personalized matches. PlanetEye offers travelers a variety of ways to control the hotels, restaurants, attractions, and cities that are presented throughout the site. We have taken this one step further - in addition to the travel interests you have saved within your profile, the contents of your Travel Packs will now be taken in to account.

We have also improved some of the areas throughout the site that provide recommendations - namely on place and destination pages. Let us know what you think!

Updated Reviews and Ratings

Travelers can now rate cities along with places. In addition, we have tightened the relationship between the two - you now must provide a rating in order to write a review, but you can rate a place without writing any review at all.

We did this to make sure we capture the best possible traveler reviews possible, while still offering an easy way to provide an opinion on a specific location without writing anything.

Improved Sharing Methods

Previously, it was only possible to share places, cities, Travel Packs, and photos using e-mail. We have integrated AddThis to offer a much wider variety of ways to get PlanetEye content to your friends and family.

RSS Feeds

Every PlanetEye user, destination, and local expert now has an RSS feed.

These are quite useful for following along with the most recent activity for things that interest you. For example, from any city on PlanetEye the RSS would provide new traveler ratings and reviews, articles from our Local Experts, as well as any new photos, restaurants, hotels, and attractions added to the city. In addition, Travel Packs that feature the city will also appear in the RSS feed.

As an example, you can subscribe to the Toronto RSS feed.

Partner Pages

One of the things that confused most users in the past was, “what are those little icons that appear everywhere?” The best example would be on the search page (see an example search query for Chicago):

When you click on any of these icons now, you are taken to a page that documents all of the places on PlanetEye associated with that partner. For example, if you were to click on the Travelocity icon, that partner page would list all of the hotels on PlanetEye you can book through Travelocity. Clicking on the New York Times icon will show you all of the places (whether a hotel, restaurant, etc…) that have been reviewed by the New York Times.

This is a great release for us and there are many more to come in 2009!

Tags: partners, recommendations, releases, reviews, rss, sharing

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 4:28 pm and is filed under PlanetEye. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.