In the first two parts of the “Where is my Travel 2.0?” series I talked about the long tail aspect and data-drivenness of online travel applications. In my today’s post I’ll write up some thoughts on Tim O’Reilly’s notion of:

Users Add Value

So this means that we need to get users to contribute, right? That obviously is an old hat but many of the mashed-up and meta-search sites clearly lack the ability to efficiently harness user contributions – which doesn’t have to be a bad thing per se, especially if we look at all the community 2.0 (trademark someone?) stuff being implemented lately in an reactive act of adoption.

Social Networks

It’s not clear at all how websites that implement relationship-centered friendship systems (which means they are projecting and extending the offline social networks of their users onto their database servers) will automatically be enabled to harness these relationships by means other than just enhancing the stickiness of the application. The basis of this doubt is the predominance of object-centered sociality, which has been depicted by Jyri Engeström (see his blog post and presentation) the founder of Jaiku.

Self-Interested Users

Another assumption that plays into the realm of object-centered sociality is that the majority of users (still) is self-interested. The main difference between services like delicious or flickr and travel communities is that the former were not primarily designed as a communication/collaboration tool. Reviewing hotels, trips or the like does not help me getting my things done, but is meant to help others in the first place. I don’t get an immediate value from reviewing like I get when tagging my bookmarks online at delicious. Participation is not intrinsic to the application.

Cognition Problems and the Wisdom of Crowds

Most problems addressed by communities that feature rating, ranking and review mechanisms are essentially cognition problems: What are the options? These almost always translate into decision problems: Where should I go? Which hotel should I pick? – and so on. In his book “The Wisdom of Crowds“, James Surowieki emphasizes the difference between such problems that people have to deal with within social settings. He suggest classifying them into following categories: Cognition or decision problems, coordination problems and cooperation problems. (David Pollard summarized these three types of problems nicely in a blog post back in 2004)
Surowieki notes that

[...] collective solutions to coordination and cooperation problems are not like the solution to cognition problems. They are fuzzier and less definitive. These solution tend to emerge over time, rather than beeing the product of a single collective decision. (emphasis mine)

Basic examples for coordination and cooperation problems of travelers include, for instance, the manifold side effects of group travel or situations where there is a high excess demand for a certain resource (e.g. hotel or flight).

Conclusions

Today’s travel communities do a great job at utilizing “their members’ need to get something off their chests” for helping users solve cognition problems. But they don’t address problems that affect groups as a whole and for which combined solution are needed. They rely on the user’s unselfishness but don’t aim at cooperation problems where a collective interest of such a kind is a requirement anyway. I am not aware of any travel website where a self-interested user gains immediate value by contributing to the collective wisdom. This is why I fancy some kind of project management tool for travelers where capturing and valuing past experiences directly and transparently translates into additional value for future travel planning – how this should work out in detail? Sly old dog…

PS: Did you have a look at VibeAgent lately? What do you think?