From the one man team that brought you Photopile and Onesheet comes another drop dead simple app, TipList. Deciding to take a trip around the world with his wife Elle last summer, creator Brenden Mulligan received a deluge of “City Tips” emails, or those emails full of must see sights, places, restaurants, bars that your friends think you’d like and that constantly get recycled when people you know come into town/travel.
Mulligan thought that there must be a better, more centralized solution than email, and built TipList — a service that “makes it easy to build a quick list of recommendations about a place you’ve been and loved.” (Sample list here.)
To use TipList, connect to the app via Facebook and Twitter and/or import your checkins from Foursquare. To build a TipList list, enter in your desired location and the list’s description. You can choose your own photo for your list cover or use a photo from Instagram tagged with your list’s location.
Then you start building lists off of your user profile, by either importing your Foursquare checkins (it takes awhile to do this) or by manually entering in tips — which you define by categories like Eating, Drinking, Sleeping, Sights, Shopping or Other. You can also rank tips by Must Do, Do, and Miss. Once finished, the site gives you options to share your lists via Twitter, Facebook or via email.
For those of you that would rather explore the things to do suggested by other people versus create list, TipList is searchable, and you can either search for a specific city and browse through individual lists, or drill down into search by country. If you like a specific tip, you can click on “Must Do” and add it to your collection of tips for each individual city or add it to one of your own lists by clicking on “Create a new tiplist with this tip.”
Users can also subscribe to a tips list for an individual city and get updates when ever someone posts a tip for that city.
“I wanted to build a clean, simple, beautiful interface that made creating these guides quick and easy,” said Mulligan, who holds that even if TipList doesn’t take off he’ll be pleased because he made something that solved this core problem of his,” I’m not looking for this product to revolutionize travel (yet). My initial goals are to focus on this one particular thing.”
Mulligan thinks that the biggest problem with Foursquare tips is essentially the lack of centralization and opinion, “In my experience, people are using Foursquare Tips to reveal actions to take after you arrive at a place (ex: “Get the Gnocchi”, WiFi code is ….”, etc…). People are using TipList to enter tips about why you’d go to a place in the first place.”
Mulligan says that he’ll decide on whether or not to build a mobile app (crucial for travelers who want to view their lists on the go) based on user behavior, “If we see a huge demand for a better mobile experience, we’ll provide one, both as a web app and native app. The community will make that decision.”