Gadgets continued

Sorry for the long delay, but lets continue on with the gadgets that I talked about in my previous post. When you first get Google Wave, there will be a message for you all about extensions that you can install. They give you a few of their recommended gadgets for you to easily install. Here is where I will try to explain them to you.

TRIPPY

First I opened up a new wave with my sister, Kira. When I opened it, it had a trip there designed by Trippy to go to New York, but I wanted to create a trip by myself, so I pressed the delete button. Now, it is asking me "Where do you want to vist?" which you can see below on the right hand side.

I would love to be able to visit my sister and see Washington D.C. Let's say that I want to go down there for a total of 5 days, visit some of the famous buildings down there, eat out at some restaurants, and maybe go to a baseball game as well during my trip. Even though my sister lives in the area, I will also assume that I am going to need a hotel to stay at.

First, I am going to try to book my hotel.

It looks as if Trippy just uses google maps to find hotels that are in the Washington D.C. area. When I zoom in on the map and click on one of the marks, it opens up a little box that tells me the name of the hotel, the address, and the website I can find the hotel at. I'm a little disappointed in that it doesn't show me any reviews or hook up with any website to ask me about hotel reservations. I guess this requires a little bit of leg work by the user to pick the hotel.

I really don't know much about Washington D.C., but I found a Marriott Courtyard so I will add that to my itinerary.

On the corner of my little box you can see "add me to your itinerary" which led me to this box. It is asking me if I want to schedule this during a specific day or unscheduled. As you can see, this gadget definitely needs some work because it would be nice to be able to say that I want to have this as my residence during my trip.

In trying to add the Nationals game to my itinerary, I ran into difficulty first finding the park on the map, and then trying to decide which icon to click to add to my itinerary. I finally picked one randomly and added it to my itinerary for day 3. As you can see below, a search for Nationals Park gave me a lot of options.

I continued to do this with different smithsonian museums and restaurants until I filled up my trip to Washington D.C.

My Thoughts

Overall, I was not very impressed with Trippy at all. Maybe the one good thing that came out of it was that my sister could help me plan the trip and suggest places for me to go. I wish that they could hook it up to a hotel website or a travel guide to help you plan your trip. You really need to use the internet a lot to look up places to go, look up reviews, look up addresses, etc, to plan this trip out.

It is a great concept, however not well thought out. Hopefully this will change before Google Wave is released for everyone!

Until next time,

Gabrielle.

Oh and if you want us to explain something, review something, or make something more clear, please let us know in a comment!