Yahoo! to put Maps and Flickr to work on travel

Yahoo! brought its Trip Planner out of a 9 month beta period today and it’s an interesting example of cool Web 2.0 apps aimed for popular adoption. Users can drag and drop Flickr photos from a pop-up of their Flickr sets to illustrate travel destinations. Maps are put to a commercial use beyond illustrating the geography of search results. Blogging via Yahoo! 360 takes destination narrative to the next level, beyond short reviews. This may well be part of what mainstream adoption of Web 2.0 looks like.

Travel is a crowded vertical, but Flickr is a strong asset for Yahoo! to bring into the game. Likewise, Yahoo! Maps doesn’t have to be the ugly step-sibling of Google Maps. It’s a nice system itself and will likely be well received by online travel site users.

I imagine that more things like this are liable to come out of the new practice of holding Yahoo! Hack Day events. Obviously the company has a whole lot to work with. Interesting integrations of multiple applications seem like the lowest hanging fruit.