Could Facebook become a one-stop shop for all our travel needs? Not at this rate, says Benji Lanyado
Couch surfing ... the internet can provide endless travel opportunities. Photograph: Tobias Bernhard/zefa/Corbis
I've been using Couchsurfing, a social network that allows users to stay with fellow members around the world, for over two years now. I've been on Facebook for a while too, and am as hooked as the rest of us. A few days ago the Couch Swap application, made by travel search company Sidestep, was launched on Facebook, and I got rather excited. But not for long.
Couch Swap is the latest travel gizmo launched using the Facebook Platform - introduced in May to allow anyone to build an application for the Facebook system. The implications are rather exciting - extended to its nth degree this could make Facebook a one-stop-shop for, well, just about anything. Especially travel. You could search for and book flights on one application, peruse hotel listings on another, plan a trip with your buddies on another and so on ... all without leaving the warm and cuddly pages of Facebook.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg explained in a recent interview with TIME that the platform "means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it." Yippee! Trigger the gold rush! Problem is, until people offer products that are actually any good, there really isn't much gold - for the user - at the end.
Couch Swap is a very poor, very limited imitation of projects like Couchsurfing and Hospitality Club . There are oodles of options that Couchsurfing offers that Couch Swap doesn't even attempt - most obviously you can't actually see the profile of the person's couch you wish to stay on until they are your "friend". On Couchsurfing you can browse through hundreds of detailed profiles, having already narrowed down the parameters of the kind of person and couch you are looking for. Then you can see if you have any mutual friends, read references other surfees have left for them, see how often they reply to requests and ... and... I could go on.
The same applies for other travel applications launched using the platform recently. Hostels, a hostel rating application made by hostelbook.com, for example, is just a rubbish version of their own website. "Flight Finder", a flight comparison application, literally redirects you to their website.
All a company can really do (at the moment) with a Facebook application is joyride - freeloading a bit of brand equity, and siphoning off some of Facebook's traffic. This might work pretty well if all you are offering is a bit of fun. TripAdvisor, for example, have a nice "Cities I've Been" map you can add. Fine. But when, like Couch Swap, you're claiming to be useful, and actually just offering a ropey version of an existing product ... well that's just annoying.
To be fair, Couch Swap is fumbling in the dark and nobody seems to have fully utilised the platform so far. TechCrunch, the world's leading techy blog ran a post recently in which it struggled to pick their top 10 applications, arguing that "the vast majority of Facebook's 2,300+ applications strike us as frivolous and unworthy of the time and effort it takes to even install them."
Looks like the wild-eyed hares at Sidestep and Hostelbook were a little too eager to get there first. There's just not much you can really do yet - like book flights, find couches, find worthy tips - that you can't do much better somewhere else. Perhaps, at least, the current inadequacy of the travel applications will hurry up progress of any tortoises waiting in the wings with better products.
So, rather like that bloke in the Grolsch advert, I would yell a great big "Shhtop!" This platform isn't ready yet. And the people building on it aren't ready either. But how long should the big dogs (Thorntree, Lastminute, Cheapflights) wait? Couch Swap may be rubbish, but it has certainly beaten Couchsurfing to the prize. Surely we users would prefer a good application later to a shoddy one now? Is the current inadequacy Facebook's fault or the developer's fault? Perhaps we're quite happy as it is - using a variety of websites for a variety of things?
