TripSay is hard to explain. It combines travel information, social networking, maps and reviews of places. As someone who enjoys traveling, I think it has potential.

Basically, you log in to TripSay and build your world by entering places you have traveled. Each place you enter can get a rating from a smiley face to a butt (really!) and a short tip or comment for which you can, thankfully use more than 140 characters. You can join groups with similar travel interests like a particular place or type of travel.

Based on your rating of places you will get recommendations on the map that match what you have indicated you enjoy. Most of my recent vacation have been to beaches, so the majority of my recommendations were for beachy places. Tripsay uses a recommendation engine to generate your results.

If you want to look for something different, you can click on different icons on the main map to see mountains, shopping, cities, etc. that have been rated by other users.

TripSay calls itself an intelligent social network (that) delivers highly targeted travel information, recommendations and tips based on one’s unique preferences and social network.

I think if TripSay gains a large user base and lots of information it could be really useful to find interesting restaurants and out of the way places that guidebooks don’t cover. But, it will really depend on the amount of users the site attracts.

It is now in free public beta.
Source: feeds.downloadsquad.com