We’ve been live, as a Freemium service, for a little over two weeks.  In my more pessimistic (pre-launch) moments I was thinking that at this stage I may be having to abandon the whole idea as no-one was purchasing Trip.  However, I’m delighted that this is not the case!  We’re massively ahead of schedule and as such we’re accelerating various upgrades that we’d hoped to do towards the end of 2015.

Even more exciting, we’re thinking of new ideas!

One idea springs from my desire to do something interesting with the Timeline.  The Timeline records your searches and articles viewed on Trip and not much else.  So, one idea is to create something called Trip Tiles!  A fresh tile would be created with every new search and at the top of the tile would be the search terms and underneath would be the articles viewed.  In many ways this is what the timeline currently does.  But I think there’s the potential to link other people’s searches.  So, you might search and find three articles and as part of that process we highlight that 1 or more of the articles has been viewed in someone else’s timeline and offer you the chance to see their tile.

Best illustrate that with one of my legendary attempts at a picture (if we roll out this feature we’ll get them properly designed):

You could go from tile to tile both browsing and looking to see if you’ve missed any useful articles that someone else has already found.  Not only that you can see what search terms they’ve used – again possibly useful.
How we’d implement this would be a challenge, but I’d see that as an interesting challenge not a particularly tough one!  Any feedback on the idea would be appreciated – comments on the blog or via email: jon.brassey@tripdatabase.com