I am really impressed with the way that tripadvisor.com is pushing forward into the social networking space. Of course, I've always liked that site as we do a lot of travelling and rely on the user comments when booking hotels in places we've not been. They have pushed to integrate Facebook well. For example, if I look up a city that a friend has tagged on his or her World Map, then I see their icon automatically on that page. I can then ask questions of people in my social group. It's a shame that more haven't travelled or joined Trip Advisor though!
I somehow discovered yesterday, their new TripWow. I never thought that sharing photos all around the net made much sense. That's why I continue to dump most images directly into Flickr. It has become my super-album storage bin. I believe I've more than 7000 images there. I noticed that TripWow allows a user to make use of photos from many online sources. I let it pull in an album of mine. As the spring trip to Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara was one of the most recent, it was the one I started to play with.
TripWow has some very intelligent aspects to it. It defaulted to TexMex music although the seleciton can be changed, and even personal music can be used. I was impressed in many ways but I have only started to discover the ways to customized the slide show.
I don't know if I'll ever do many of these, or if I'll even finish this one, but I certainly like the idea of being able to mash up photos in a special slide-show presentation. I would imagine that five minutes is most people's limit of concentration, so thirty photos would probably be an appropriate size. This has far too many and at twelve minutes it is wayyyy to long. I simply wanted to showcase the new software, not actually create a valuable, watchable, one. Even though the photos are all mine, I don't think I could stand trying to watch this whole mess.