Boo.com is back. For those of you who haven't been around long enough to remember, boo.com famously went bust in 2000 as the dot com bubble burst; this time it's back as a travel site rather than a fashion retailer.
Having spent a significant portion of my career designing and running travel related web sites I was intrigued to see what boo.com had to offer.
The first thing to hit me was the web 2.0 feel about the site; users are greeted with a location tag cloud and a large, simple to use search box.
Digging a bit further I came across the user generated content (UGC) aspects of the site, where users sign-up, post their comments, reviews, photos and put pins in an interactive map. Slightly more surprisingly for me, are the social networking features, giving the ability to create a network of friends.
Whilst I am au fait with this functionality, it raises the question as to why a site would want to create their own social networks when other sites such as facebook and myspace do it so well.
I already use LinkedIn for my work network and facebook for my social network; do people really want to create a new network for their travel reviews? Surely companies should be spending more effort to create embedded applications in facebook rather than trying to be social networking sites. Are these companies after a slice of the $2bn value (allegedly) or the 40 odd million users of facebook? Or is this a continuing trend that will necessitate new technology to manage all of the social networks out there ala Microsoft Passport?
Welcome back boo.com, albeit under totally new management, I like the web 2.0 feel to your site, but I’m not sure I want to register my profile just yet.