Jon Holato

Placely, a social networking Web site tailored toward frequent travelers, launched into public beta two weeks ago. The social travel space, to my knowledge, is one that has yet to become overly saturated, and Placely looks geared up to snag a chunk of the market share.

When you first log in you are taken to a dashboard page, where you can see who is traveling today, who you can meet today (i.e. who is in your area today), and who is traveling soon; all within your own network. At the time of this writing all members are inserted into a Placely Beta network in order to facilitate user interaction and assist users in discovering the features of the site.

The user profiles found on Placely are pretty standard in terms of social networking, although the Ajax functionality on many of the features certainly makes usability a pleasure. Of particular interest, however, is the ability to set privacy levels on different features such as your travel schedule, home location, network, career profile, personal profile, photos and age.

The MyNetwork section shows all of your Placely friends, and can be filtered by various categories. Additionally, you can monitor friend requests and search for/invite other friends. My favorite thing in this section, however, is the “Where Are They Today?” Google Map, where your friends appear as pegs and you can click them to see where they are currently.

The groups section is similar to something you would find on other social networking sites, however Placely throws in the same Google Map feature from the MyNetwork section to allow you to see where the members of the group are today.

Placely’s TravelCal is really the lifeblood of the site. It’s where you go to add trips — single or multiple destination — manage your entire travel schedule, and arrange meetups with friends based upon where you’re traveling on a given day. When you click on one of your trips a search is pre-populated with your location and dates, and Placely will tell you if anyone in your network will be at that location on that date. The search also features a distance drop down, so you can expand your query as desired.

The MeetUp section is basically the search from the TravelCal, but expanded to allow you to enter whatever you like for query criteria. It also adds a Category option so you can search for a particular group of friends.

I am pretty impressed with how easy Placely has made it to manage your friends with your travel calendar. It’s certainly a useful tool for the frequent traveler who spends a lot of time in different places and wants to visit friends. The site states that it is in constant development and improving daily, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see enhancements to the current feature set or even deployment of additional capabilities.

My only concern with Placely is the user base. It’s a great tool targeted at a great niche, but can it get a large enough user base to be successful? The majority of Internet users already belong to a social network and aren’t looking to try something new, especially if their friends aren’t on it. This will be the major challenge for Placely. If it can overcome this obstacle, then I believe that with the features available it can be successful.

Alternatively, as some final food for thought, perhaps they could develop a Placely Facebook App or some sort of Open Social integration, as this would indirectly allow millions of users on other social networking sites to interact with and use the site. Maybe even some sort of widget that bloggers like myself can embed into their sidebars; or, and this is a real stretch, packaging their software for resale to large corporations with thousands of weekly travelers.

If you’re a frequent traveler with friends who travel frequently as well, I would definitely encourage you to check out Placely. Here are some screen shots I captured while using the site:

1) Home Page

2) Dashboard

3) Profile (owner)

4) Profile (visitor)

5) MyNetwork

6) Groups

7) TravelCal

8 ) MeetUp

9) Upload Photo (cool Ajax functionality)