First look at Trek America Live - the new social networking site for the Trek community

A new travel social networking site was launched today at a media lunch in London called Trek America Live - I heard about it about a week ago as I was lucky enough to get an invite to the launch, although I had to work, which wasn't so bad because we've had an exciting technology event of our own, but still would have loved to have been there. The site has been developed to support the Trek America community of travellers, and friends and family of those on trek, helping people to keep in touch. According to the site, TrekAmerica Live will can enable you to:

1. Find out what travelling with TrekAmerica is all about!
2. Meet your fellow trekkers before your tour departs!
3. Keep in touch with friends and family while on the road!
4. Write a travel blog and upload photos and videos for everyone to see!
5. Earn Trek Points for discounts and offers exclusive to TrekAmerica Live!  

As a technology geek and travel obsessive, I was really excited about getting access to the site to check it out! I've succeeded in quickly and easily creating a basic profile on the site and can now upload photos, videos, start a blog, contribute to the live forum, add friends and more.

I've had a quick look at the discussion forum tool which looks fairly intuitive with the usual WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor and clearly the space can be structured better than the Facebook discussion tool, plus the WISIWYG editor provides enhanced functionality over the Facebook tool. Not sure whether there is a notification system - I would expect that you at least receive an e-mail if someone replies to your message though. Good to see there is a discussion board already in place for users to provide feedback and suggestions - people are at the heart of any community so it's important that the tool meets the needs of users if it is to be successful.

I love that you can search for your trek, join the official group to meet other trekkers in advance of your trip and that the interactive Trek maps display photos and videos that have been uploaded to the site, making it much easier for trekkers to share their content. But what I will be interested to know is once the content is uploaded to the site, who will own it? Perhaps a future development of the site could be to integrate a creative commons licence, so people can choose to legally make their photos available for other users to re-use or can choose to maintain full copyright (like on Flickr). Or perhaps it is Trek's intention to use user-generated content for marketing, which is something Trek do now as we are able to submit photos from our treks which may then appear in brochures?

The site is obviously in Beta testing mode still as there are key pieces of legal information missing, including terms and conditions of use and a privacy policy, both which are noted as 'coming soon'. I'm not sure they were expecting trekkers (customers) to join the site yet, but if it's technically possible then those of us who are keen, will exploit that! It is possible to connect the site with Facebook (as Trek Live is not attempting to compete with Facebook but instead, integrate) although I haven't tested that yet - quite like to know what the TCs and privacy policy will be first ;o)

It's great to see Trek America making more use of Web 2.0 technologies to support their customers and I'm sure the site is going to continue to develop more over the coming weeks. Thinking in terms of the privacy and control issues that have been covered by the media in recent times, I noticed that it doesn't seem possible to delete your account, perhaps this can be achieved by contacting help? Not that I desire to delete my account anytime soon - I'm already looking forward to testing the site properly when I plan my next trip :)