Rev2.org

Anyone who’s made plans for a vacation knows what it’s like to sit down with a pencil and paper and begin researching online, either filling your bookmarks or writing down a lot of information so you can compare your results.  Even if you know that you’ll be booking with so-and-so cruise line or staying at a specific hotel, when you begin comparing all of the great places to see, things to do, places to eat, etc. it can still be unwieldy.

You want to plan a great vacation and do and see all of the things you want to do.  You’ve also got a budget.  Plus a specific time frame for your itinerary.  This takes time and is definitely not something most would consider fun or relaxing–the whole idea of a vacation in the first place.

Duffel (duffelup.com) has a solution for this.

Think of it as Delicious bookmarks for your vacation.  Only better.  Maybe Delicious with Post-Its added.

The way it works will explain this.  It’s so absurdly simple, but useful, that it boggles me nobody has come up with this idea before.  First, you bookmark any page (site, venue, etc.) into Duffel as you travel the Web doing your research and initial information gathering and planning.

As you build a storehouse of the places you want to go and the things you want to do on your vacation, they’re stored in Duffel waiting for you to come back and organize them.

Once you have all of them and think you’ve got the majority of your sights and restaurants (or whatever) logged, you then go to Duffel and, inside your account, begin organizing.  Your stored links are viewed as thumbnails and you can drag and drop them to create an itinerary.

Now it gets interesting.  Let’s say you’re going to Santa Monica and a friend of yours was there last year and recommended a specific restaurant.  You can have your friend find the information on it and collaboratively share it in your Duffel.  You can do this with several friends or have your whole family involved in group vacation planning.

Each member can recommend venues (URLs or just directly inputted text) and each can have a say in the time table and organization.  For busy families or for working vacations with a group from the office, this could be a great way to save time and headaches.  You can even share your plans with the world by allowing them to be public.  Browsing through those, I see that a lot of great ideas could be found that way as well.

Duffel is made by four Web entrepreneurs and technologists in San Francisco who love to travel.  The site launched at TechCrunch50 in September and is free to use.

This site is a comprehensive, centralized lifeflow platform, by their own description.  I would say it’s a social media sharing platform, which is the same thing, but doesn’t sound so “Web 2.0 launchy-mission-statementy.”  It’s based on a relatively old idea, but is much more all-inclusive and integrated than most apps of this nature.

Launching in September, Rrripple.com is in public beta.  It’s been in development for two years, however, and the site definitely shows that.

The focus at Rrripple is on real-life social networks rather than the somewhat disjointed ones we tend to create through the standard streams like Twitter or Facebook.  It’s made for sharing things with small, private, and relevant audiences like immediate family, close friends, church groups, and that sort of thing.  It could potentially be used by business who need to share documents and so forth as well, I think.

Of course, you don’t have to have a physical, real-life connection with those in your Rrripple network(s).  There’s nothing stopping you from inviting all of your Facebook friends or Myspace contacts to join your Rrripple network.  When you see how it works and what it does, though, you most likely won’t bother doing this.

Rrripple is a sharing tool.  It’s not a groupie site for playing Mobsters or Farm Town (I admit, I’m addicted to that one), it’s for sharing personal videos, photos, documents, voicemails, and so forth.  For doing that, it’s really slick.

The layout is like most apps of this nature: dark and techy.  That doesn’t change how well it functions, though.  Which is why I mentioned they’d been in development for two years.

Your media is laid out in chronological sequence so you can have photos that lead into video or explanation documents and scans of your yearbook tied with each other.  It functions primarily as a life diary in this respect.  You can ad sound, video, pics, documents, and all kinds of things to your Rrripple account for display.  You can mark things as private, public, in-network-only, etc.

The sharing part comes into play when your network is apprised of new additions.  Interactive messaging and other tools make it easy to chat about old times, remember something great, or congratulate on something new.

It’s easy to use, uses https for security, and works pretty well.  It’s worth a try and is free to use in beta.

Collaboration and design modeling sites aren’t anything new.  Since websites began, the need to involve the client in the site design and workflow has been a part of the professional design and development process.  Solutions for this range from very expensive and robust to free and useless.

IntuitionHQ.com is somewhere in the middle of that.  It’s very inexpensive (you don’t pay anything until you invite your client to look the design over) and aims at one goal: usability.

Web Design, of course, has two major goals: appearance and functionality.  A site can look really good, but be utterly useless or it can be ugly, but highly functional.  Good design aims for the center point between the two.  The hardest part of that, most of the time, is the usability side.  IntuitionHQ allows you to design something you like and let the client decide on the final aspects of usability.

The app also allows you to invite others to test out the site’s design without going “live” with it, so you can control who’s visiting and using it and what kind of feedback you get in that process.

IntuitionHQ is easy to use as well.  You create a virtual host by putting in a site title and the URL (mysite.intuitionhq.com) then it prompts for a username and password.  A few other details, such as your desired introduction and thank you messages for your testers/clients for that project.  Then you upload a screenshot of your site design.

Then you ad tasks for the testers to do and select sections of the site those tasks apply to.  So “click on the newsletter signup button” prompts them to (hopefully) find your newsletter signup button and click it on the first try.  This sort of usability testing, without having to include actual functionality, makes the life of the graphic designer much easier.

The idea here, remember, is to test usability, not functionality.  Once you have your test ready for action, you pay the $5 and go live with it.  At this point, you invite clients (or anyone else) to come check it out.  IntuitionHQ lets you send tweets, Facebook alerts, emails, etc. to do this.

Each task will have its results collected and you’re presented with a graphical representation and the numbers to correspond.  So if you have 10 testers and 9 of them were able to find that newsletter signup button right off the bat, it will tell you that.

Overall, a very useful, affordable, and functional site.  For most web development houses that deal with small business and clients, this is the majority of their needs for keeping the client involved in the process.  Definitely worth a look.