Imagine the ability to tap into everything your friends know about travel. Every destination they’ve been, every activity they’ve done, every hotel they’ve stayed in, every trip they’ve taken. If you could bottle that up and use it for your next trip, wouldn’t that be valuable to you? That’s the power of FriendSourced Travel.

What Is FriendSourced Travel?

FriendSourced Travel describes the process of tabulating input from your Facebook friends for the sole purpose of making a more informed and personalized travel decision. Facebook friend covers friends/family/acquaintances that are your ‘friends’ on Facebook.

FriendSourced travel falls under the banner of social travel.

Simple Example

If you were trying to decide where to go for your honeymoon, you’d FriendSource this to all your married FaceBook friends. You could suggest a few destinations and gauge their input or leave the destination list entirely up to them.

It’s a conscious decision to include a cross section of your friends in the traveldecision making process and not just a few random phone calls or emails asking where you should go.

Why Would You FriendSource your Travel?

FriendSourcing your Travel captures conscious and subconscious nuggets of information we all collect from one another, through initial and ongoing interactions, for the purpose of making more informed travel decisions.

When I recommend a trip or a destination or activity to you, I automatically use what I know in the decision making process. That’s the beauty of FriendSourced Travel.

Even in very loose interactions, people get to know you. By meeting you at a party, I’d get to know a little about you (first impressions, what do you do, interests, where you work, who else you know here, where you went to school, whether you’re smart or not, how much I like you …). Maybe we see each other at church or over dinner, we talk some more. Fast forward a few months and we become Facebook Friends. By this point, we know quite a bit about one another don’t we? Maybe you find out I’ve been to Fiji and London and Hong Kong. I find out you’ve been to Italy and Morocco.

With FriendSourcing, we can tap into each others travel knowledge to make our next trip better.

FriendSourcing Travel Done Right

FriendSourcing Travel can’t be done through wall posts and comments. There needs to be a Facebook application built around the components of FriendSourcing Travel.

That allows for suggestions on where to go/what to do/where to stay.

To allow for a healthy discourse (read arguments) so people can share their experiences and influence one another. Think a few one liners and not lengthy soliloquy’s like this blog post.

Last but not least, to allow for people to rank the collective suggestions and vote on them like you would a Digg post.

There needs to be a mechanism to give more weight to some friends than others – so friends who’ve been to that destination before (because their profile says so) get more weight in the decision making process. I can assign a 3.0X multiple to my friend John who lives on a plane. I could assign more weight to a destination my wife “votes” up. Even the ability to remove friends from the decision making process all together.

The application should allow me to segment my friends by geography, status, age, etc. I should be able to ask just my married friends about where to go for my honeymoon, or only my single friends on where I should go for my bachelor party. I should be able to ask my friends in New Yorkfor what Indian Restaurant I should go to next time I’m there. I should be able to leverage the “Facebook Lists” functionality.

The use of ‘game mechanics’ to drive friends to share their viewsand a reward system (points, karma, goodwill..).

The application needs to assign all my friends a ‘score’ based on where they’ve been. This can be derived literally from the  ’Where I’ve Been‘ Facebook Application but not everybody has that installed so we’d have to look at interests, tags, destinations and more nuances sources like “Our Fiji Honeymoon Pictures” or “Fiji Videos”.

I’m just scratching the surface on functionality.

Where Can I FriendSource my Travel?

There are a few companies that are starting to do this but none that warrant me listing them here. I’ll post a list in October 2010. Sorry!

What to FriendSource

Any trip qualifies. Even business trips (imagine a LinkedIn FriendSourcded Travel application).

When to FriendSource your Travel

When you have enough of a “network” of friends, when you have some connection to your friends, when (on the whole) you trust your friends, when you’re open to the idea of outside influence in your travel decision making process.

When NOT to FriendSource your Travel

This approach is based on the premise that your online friends (Facebook friends for example) have some connection to you. If you accept every Facebook Friend Request regardless of whether you know them or not, this doesn’t apply to you. I would argue you’re getting closer to CrowdSourcing your Travel there.

If you don’t have a large enough pool of Friends, don’t bother. If it’s just you and 3 Facebook friends, this isn’t going to work. You need at least 50 friends or more and ideally more. On the whole, certainly after 6 months to a year, you’re going to have enough friends to qualify for FriendSourcing your Travel.

Rebuttals

Can’t you just search travel review sites and do a little homework? Sure you can but FriendSourcing can extend that research even further. It’s not an either or, you can do both. Even if you compare FriendSourcing to individual research, done right, FriendSourcing yields a better result.

What if I’m friends with someone who’s travel opinion I don’t want? The application should allow to ‘ignore’ a persons recommendation in the final tally.

Can I use this with Twitter or Ning or other networks? Possibly. Preferablysocial networks that mimic the social dynamics of Facebook.  Networks where anybody can friend or follow you do not apply.

Tell me what you think!

Share some comments and follow me on Twitter (@travelalchemist) for updates.

The first company that does this will offer a leap forward in social travel in a way we have yet to see.