About Tripline

A note from Tripline creator Byron Dumbrill

Thanks very much for visiting. We've worked very hard to create something unique with Tripline, and I hope you enjoy using it to plan and remember your travels. I'm working on the product all the time, so if there's something you'd like to see, please contact support. I'm pretty busy, so I'll respond as quickly as I can.

Your Plans Become Your Stories

One of the earliest concept slides I put together had a simple statement: "Planning is a creative process." And like any creative process, planning travel begins with an idea, moves on to a sketch and details are refined over time. You're never really done, and it's never perfect. So I wanted to build Tripline as a way for you to create your initial sketch, and make the product flexible enough to let you turn a fun sketch into a refined plan. And, the cool thing is that if you use Tripline that way, you already have the framework of a story to tell. Just add photos, a bit of text for each place and you have a lasting journal so you can remember it all.

Share With The People You Care About

At its most basic level, Tripline is a way for you to communicate by putting places on a map. That's a very human activity that has been happening for thousands of years. Tripline adds a social layer to that communication so, whether you're a regular person or a rockstar, you can share where you're going, where you are and where you've been with the people you care about. That could be your family, your friends, or all of your fans...it's up to you.

A Window On The World

Aside from the most obvious use (travel planning and sharing), I've built Tripline to help you tell any story that involves moving across the map. If you like history, you could use Tripline to create The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere or Lewis & Clark's Journey. If you're into current events, you could create The Inauguration of Barack Obama or Capt. Chelsey Sullenberger's famous Flight of US Air 1549. When I first started, I was amazed that map-based visuals of events like these were so difficult to find online. I think now that Tripline exists, that sort of map-based content will have a home. And the possibilities are endless: author and band tours, charity walks and rides, culinary adventures, fictional trips from books and movies, sporting events, scientific expeditions, etc. Here's an example:

Maps As Media Objects

The story behind the origins of the Tripline concept goes back to May of 2005. My girlfriend (now wife) Vivien and I were planning our first vacation together: an epic 15 day trip to Costa Rica. While we were planning - laptops side-by-side on a table scattered with maps and guidebooks - I became overwhelmed with the complexity of the trip and realized that I needed a visual overview. I started downloading map images and drawing lines. I can still remember her sideways glances...she thought for sure I was procrastinating or just goofing around. But, like any good team, we started working together; she would focus on research and I would add items to the map. Periodically we'd review the visual plan and make adjustments to simplify. Both of us hate covering the same ground twice, so the map was very helpful in identifying inefficiencies. After many hours of work, the result was the very first Tripline:

I tried to make the map-based plan both fun and useful - two of the core product principles at Tripline. You'll notice a silly title, images of activities like SCUBA diving, as well as a lot of practical logistics information. You'll also notice that the whole plan fits on a single page. That meant that we only needed to have one piece of paper readily accessible throughout our journey. It ended up being incredibly helpful.

What I didn't realize at the moment was how useful the map would be after the trip. When I uploaded our photos to Flickr, I added the map as the first image in the set. Friends immediately started commenting on how cool it was (and making fun of me for being so detailed). They said they really understood where we went and what we did; things that photos don't convey. That was the first brief moment of realization for me. But, what really surprised me was perhaps a year later when a good friend of mine asked me where we stayed in Costa Rica - he had just started planning a trip there with his wife. Instead of digging through old emails/papers/itineraries, all I had to do was send him a link to the image. It took less than a minute. In fact, I've sent the same image to many of my friends and they've all used it as a reference for their own plans.

It struck me that a map was a new type of media object, similar to a photo or a video. Having spent years running product teams at Jumpcut and Yahoo!, I also understood how to build services that centered around the creation, sharing and presentation of media objects online. So, I set out to build Tripline: an online application to create and share maps for your trips. As you look around the Tripline site, you'll notice that the presentation is very similar to what you might find on a photo or video sharing site - that's by design. I feel that people naturally understand this style of content presentation thanks to services like YouTube that helped to define the standards. Given the information-overload style of many online travel services, I'm hoping that Tripline's media-object-based design will be a breath of fresh air. The goal is to bring content to the forefront, make it entertaining, make it easy to share and provide a solid anchor for each trip that you create. I hope you like it.

By the way, here's the same trip, now on Tripline:

A Long Road

Building a new product is always a more difficult process than you think it will be at the beginning. Even if you've done it many times before, nostalgia somehow eliminates the pain of 18 hour days, 7 day weeks and complete uncertainty. So you jump in, start defining concepts and before you know it, you're too far along (and you've told too many people) to turn back. You do what my Dad always says is the most important thing: you keep moving forward. You also have to postpone many of the amazingly cool ideas you have in the conceptual stage in order to get something built and out in the world. As I look at Tripline today, there are hundreds of features in my head that aren't yet part of the product. To give you a perspective on how I make product decisions, here are the Tripline product principles, right from the pitch deck:

1. Simple and useful
2. Social
3. Mobile and real time
4. Open and integrated
5. Visual and fun

I'm not anywhere near 100% mark on any of these, but I feel that the product has a stable base of functionality and a great roadmap. I'm also hoping that feedback from the user community will contribute significantly to future development, so don't keep quiet. You can send feedback via Tripline Help

The Company

Tripline is 100% self-funded, so everything here is on a very small budget. Tripline HQ is a converted garage and for now, it's only me working on the product. I'm open to investment interests, but these days I'm mainly focused on building a great product and growing the community.

The Platform

We use a number of excellent third-party services for Tripline. I want to mention some of the key ones here as way of saying thanks.

  MapBox

Mapbox has great suite of products that are at the core of the Tripline experience. Since migrating away from Google Maps, I've been impressed with the Mapbox platform and I'm looking forward to expanding the integration. Thanks Mapbox. www.mapbox.com

  Tripit

Tripit users can connect their accounts to Tripline and import their itineraries to visualize their plans and share their travel stories. We're big fans of Tripit and we're glad to be included on their list of their recommended tools. www.tripit.com

  Framework 7

We use Framework7 for our iOS and Android mobile apps. It's an awesome platform, and allows us to streamline our mobile app development process significantly. Please join us in supporting Framework7 on Patreon

Thanks

If you've read this far, you're a loyal fan, so thanks for your interest. I'm excited to see how the world unfolds for Tripline, and we'd be happy to have you as part of the community. If you haven't already, sign up and start creating trips. I think you'll like it.

- Byron