Tripwolf, the social travel guide that we introduced last month, has launched in public beta. The site allows users to network with friends to create an ideal travel trip, and also has a number of features designed to help research destinations and points of interest. To coincide with the launch, Tripwolf also announced that MairDumont, a travel guide publisher, has invested about $1.2 million into the company, in addition to the backing it has received from Austrian/American incubator i5invest.
One of the most appealing features of the site is the ability to generate a printable pdf travel guide by dragging and dropping the POIs you’ll be visiting. Unfortunately, while the dragging and dropping functionality works well, the guides themselves are very sparse, offering little more than an address, the hours of operation, and a one paragraph description. It would be nice to see a bit more content in these, even if it was only a summarized version of a Wikipedia article.
Tripwolf draws its data from a number of external sources, including Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube. And while it features a fairly comprehensive listing of interesting locales, it may have a hard time differentiating itself from countless other travel sites – there doesn’t seem to be anything too unique going on here.