VentureBeat

If you want to share your travels with friends and family check out Driftr. The service is in alpha testing, but you can request an invitation.

Driftr lets you detail your past trips or those in progress, ranking places to eat, places to stay and attractions. It includes a blog for each day of the trips you create.

Erick Laubach, one of the founders and developers, says that the site targets the younger generation with a slick, easy to use design. It uses a custom made world map to appease the eyes as opposed to a drab Google map, keeps the advertising discrete, and showcases a sizeable quantity of colorful pictures (about eight thousand total right now; remember this is an early alpha).

The company has plans for several improvements in subsequent alpha releases, such as linking to friends and the ability to invite anyone to the service.

Competitors, such as Trip Advisor and Virtual Tourist, may have a commanding presence in the crop of travel sites, but even with their vast quantities of information, they may not prove quite so competitive on the design front. Their interfaces are not very attractive, the quality of the content is left to the user to parse through, and they bombard users with excessive advertising.

Laubach says he wants to build something useful and entertaining and has no grand plans to take over the industry or flip the company. It’s a service built by people who had a need for it in their personal lives, he says.

Driftr was developed part-time by three developers based out of the Los Angeles area over the last four months.

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Tags: co:driftr