A bit more about our first release. We’ve built a lot of functionality that you’ll find in many travel journals. You can create entries through a web interface, with fields to enter where you are, and you can add photos as well. People can comment on your posts and see your journal as a list of posts, or as a map.
As we have integrated the journal with our mobile service we can populate your journal with location entries automatically as you use your phone. To make it a bit more interesting we show a photo of the place where you are and the weather there too. Of course, you may not want to share your location with other people, so you can turn the tracking off, or restrict who can see it.
The idea is that you can buy one of our SIMs, take in on your holiday and when you get back you have an attractive record of the places you have been to without doing anything. When you travel there are often times when you have time to kill, like sitting on a bus or waiting at an airport. This is a great time to send a text message to your journal with an update. To make it as easy as possible you can send the text message to a short code like ‘888′.
Of course, you may want to share your journal, particularly with family and friends, so we let you set your posts for private viewing, friend and family viewing or public viewing. If it’s private, only you can see it when you sign in. You can set a visitor password to give to family and friends so they can see the family and friend view. Or if you post to you public journal, anyone can see it. If you want to get sophisticated there’s an advanced settings page that lets you get even more flexibility about what type of information is shown.
One of the other problems when you travel is that you may be in a different timezone which means that you only get a small window to call home each day. Posting to the journal is a great way to let people at home know what you’re up to without having to find that window. If you do want to get in touch, we’ve built a ‘get in touch’ page that lets people call you or send you a text from the website. On that page we show where you are and, very soon, the time there, so Mum and Dad don’t call you at 3am.
We will be updating the service with lots more features in the coming months and I’ll post more about that next time.
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