TravBuddy hits 1 million Members
By Darren Cronian on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

Well, what a week. Apologies for the lack of blog posts folks and normal service will resume soon. You could say I have been busy with the re-design of this blog, and the launch of Experience Florida, the first in a number of travel blog style guides that I’ll be launching, with the help of a few friends.

TravBuddy hits 1million Members

I received an email from Eric Bjorndahl, of travbuddy.com, to inform me that the travel social networking site has hit 1,000,000 registered members. This is a staggering achievement, and confirms travbuddy as one of the fastest growing online travel networks.

Well done..

Oh, and I have to say thanks to the guys and girls at Travel Weekly, for linking to some of my blog posts as part of their news articles.

Thanks for all the emails; I will get through them all this week!


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10 responses to “TravBuddy hits 1 million Members”

Sam I Am | 18 September, 2007 at 9:11 am

It’s travbuddy.com, not travelbuddy.com - that link takes me to some advert site :)

Congrats to Eric; very impressive!

Darren Cronian | 18 September, 2007 at 9:21 am

Thanks Sam, I’ll have to stop writing blog posts in the early hours of the morning.

Rob | 18 September, 2007 at 6:37 pm

Wow, 1 million. How long as that taken?

Rohan | 18 September, 2007 at 6:41 pm

I signed up ages ago, but have not visited it since.

Guess I need to pay it another look now that I have just got back from my trip around Europe.

Sam I Am | 18 September, 2007 at 8:15 pm

A couple of years or a couple of months, depending on how you look at it. They were growing at the same pace as most travel blogging websites until they launched a Facebook app about 4 months ago. It’s a nice and simple app, perfect for Facebook, where you click on a few countries and it kicks back a map to your profile with those countries coloured in. As part of creating this map you sign up at Travbuddy so they gain lots of new members that way (not sure if you actually are still rerouted to the travbuddy site, it used to be like that but I know FB users kind of frown on that and the tools are there to drive the entire process on FB).

A popular app will give you tens of thousands of new members each day, hence the million (think they had less than a 100 000 when launching the app). The really interesting thing for all of us with FB apps is how many of the users actually end up using the site behind the app. Can you get enough users using your own site and products to cover the cost of developing the app and hosting it for lots of users.

It’s still untreaded waters but definitely interesting! :)

Sam
ps. the above is not meant to take away from the achievement in any way; it’s a great achievement and building an app that gets a million users to add it is not easy!! Congrats again to them! Our app has only had 20 000 or so adds :(

Darren Cronian | 19 September, 2007 at 2:54 am

Sam, I can’t remember where I read this now, but Facebook are paying over £100,000 in prizes for the best developed applications. Will try and remember where I read it!

Sam I Am | 19 September, 2007 at 8:01 am

Hmm, are you referring to the FBfund? That was just launched yesterday (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/17/facebook-launches-fbfund-with-accel-and-founders-fund-to-invest-in-new-facebook-apps/), but is somewhat different. It’s a grant for developers who are starting out and a pretty neat step from some developers point of view. Of course there are others worried it will mean those apps that get that grant and possibly follow up funding will get more publicity and promotion within Facebook, but only time will tell I guess. FB has been pretty good so far at managing possible conflicts of interest, so I doubt this will be different.

Either way, this is sure to lead to even more innovation in the apps department. Very smart :)

Rohan | 19 September, 2007 at 9:23 pm

Not sure I understand what all the fuss about Facebook is about.

Darren Cronian | 19 September, 2007 at 9:38 pm

Sam, I obviously dreamt the competition, but yes the FBfund is what I read about.

Rohan, sign up and see for yourself. It’s quite addictive.

Garri | 19 September, 2007 at 9:45 pm

FB has to be one of the most impressive web2.0 sites around right now - it’s a platform really. The idea of being able to create apps that are used by the community is mind-blowing.

That said, the TravBuddy app is, like most of the apps on FB, pretty dull but seems to be popular. Not only is it dull, it’s useless, unlike their otherwise excellent site.

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