WAYN has always been about bringing together like-minded people to love to travel, have fun, and meet new people. Well, from a personal perspective, Jerome and myself couldn’t have had a better experience in doing just that than the EPIC ICE Weekender. ICE is the 4th installment of such an event. WHether it stands for Internet Conclave of Entrepeneurs or simply represts a bit of the cold stuff is not what’s important. What is though is the fun and adventure that we have just we just experienced with around 50 other entrepreneurs and like-minded people, in Argentiere / Chamonix, France over the past weekend. In the true spirit of entrepreneurship, it was an event organized by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs and their like-minded friends, and was the quintessential example of what travelling should all be about – doing what you love with people that you would love to do it with.

Back at WAYN base camp, we’ve been thinking long and hard about where to best take the future direction of WAYN, and one of the characteristics that really strikes a chord with us is the fact that it is not so much where you go that makes all the difference, but what you do and more importantly who you do it with. Where you are or where you plan to be clearly does have an impact and us here at WAYN believe strongly that it is our duty to showcase some of the most amazing places in the world to visit and inspire you to travel to, but in reality, almost all the places around the world have something special to offer, but if you don’t know what to do when you get there or who to do it with, you are likely to have a fraction of the fun.

Those of us who have been fortunate enough to experience travelling outside of your typical packaged holiday experience will know, that half the fun is in meeting new people along the way and experiencing things with them that you never expected, but in the end, made the trip what it is. Had I been in Chamonix on my own, with no ski’s, it would have been like dying of hunger and having a beautifully cooked meal sitting in front of me, whilst tied up in chains with no-one around to get me out. How many of us have stayed in lovely 4 or 5 star hotels, only to find that we have had a much better time, staying in a backpackers, purely because you meet fun people in the same boat who equally want to explore and do fun stuff in the location you’re in. Don’t get me wrong – I would rather sleep in a comfortable king sized bed in a luxury hotel, but if it meant being on my own with nothing to do – I know what I would prefer.

Anyway, I think you catch my drift! Sometime’s it’s hard for people who haven’t ventured beyond the confines of their package holiday experience, or even travelled at all, to realize what they are missing. Most people who haven’t, have this perception that travelling on your own or even roughing it a little, is brave and they couldn’t think of anything worse, as they would miss all their home creature comforts and would be scared of not being able to cope out of the country – on their own. Well guess what – ICE may have been a group of 50 people, but each and every one of those 50 people came on their own, and made friends either on the trip, or in most cases on previous ICE trips. You have to start somewhere, and what better place to start than on WAYN, where you can not only find the people, places and activities around you or where you plan to go; Meet the people to do fun stuff with, and ultimately, share experiences, memories and realize your dreams with others.

With 15 million + members all looking to meet people from around the world, WAYN is like that virtual bar where everyone there is keen to make new friends, rather than give you a dirty look and question your motives for talking to them. I challenge you to find a more friendly, humble and diverse bunch of people on any other social network. WAYN is not perfect, and we have a lot of things that we are working on to improve the service for all our global members, and there’s a lot more we can do to attract others who may have been on WAYN in the past and / or moved on to Facebook and beyond, or even those who never even heard of WAYN. But for those of you who have ventured into WAYN’s world, and experienced this magic that I am referring to – please do your bit to share the love with your other friends and get them involved.

I hope all of you get to experience what you love to do (whether it be skiing, surfing, sailing whilst abroad, or even stamp collecting, cooking or watching movies, whilst at home) – with people you’d love to do it with. Go on… Branch out. It will be one of the best things that you will ever do.Trust me

Stay tuned for an update on what’s coming very soon to WAYN and a completely new initiative that we are launching that may take some of you by surprise! I will update you in a following post!

All the best,

Pete

P.S. For just a flavour of some of the pics (the rest are in some top security vault, that one day soon of course will end up on WAYN) – see below

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There has been a lot of hype as of late (and particularly at Le Web) on the latest services allowing real time information and particularly amongst real time search engines which aggregate your social feeds from various platforms. FriendFeed being an example (and acquired last year by Facebook)

Today, I wanted to go through a recently launched site – Nsyght.com - a company based in London with an engineering  office in Ankara (Turkey). I have actually personally invested in the business (I should disclose this and be upfront) and what particularly fascinates me about the company is not only their great platform and what it already delivers and promises to – but also the true passion and great energy from their CEO and Founder Geoffrey McCaleb – they recently close on $200,000 of funding and have shown great momentum since going live just a few weeks ago. Let’s take a closer look…

Nsyght is a twitter and Facebook web client that allows you to aggregate, share, and search a users social graph in real time. Nsyght is similar to other aggregators like Friendfeed and Cliqset, however it was primarily designed to allow users to use nsyght alongside their primary social networks, instead of seeking to be an outright replacement. Nsyght integrates with a number of difference services today like Facebook, Digg, Stumbleupon, Flickr, Vimeo, Delicious, and Last.fm, and plan to add more over the coming weeks.

The primary goal of nsyght is to allow users to keep in touch with their social graph – saving them having to log onto many services every day just to keep in touch. A social graph is not just a collection of friends or people you follow on one service, it covers your collective friends across all services that you use. So by providing powerful searching tools nsyght can give users the ability to actually find things of interest – even if they have a fairly active graph on Facebook, Twitter, and others.

Also, nsyght works really hard to add context to the real time stream along. Users can see photos and videos inline, view threaded discussions (even if that discussion did not take place on nsyght), simple facility to post, share/retweet and reply. Also users have the ability to filter their personal real time stream by video/photo, service, someone they follow, or even tag and search term.

Part of the power of social media is the ability to collaborate and share with a wide group of people. But, how many discussion are missed due to the speed of the real time web? Take this typical twitter entry:

10 minutes of what? Is she a masseuse? Chiropractor? Mechanic? With the context available from this entry, who knows? But with nsyght, they bring that context directly to you, so you can see the discussion thread from the very beginning:

Not only do we learn that Jeff Pulver is organizing a #140conf meetup in Chicago, but we can see that Liz is not a personal trainer, but a speaker! All this context would easily be lost in the real time firehose.

So context is great, but if you have an active social graph, all the context in the world will lock you away from “discovery” if not for search. This is where nsyght really shines. Unlike other aggregation services, the search is very flexible and can deliver complex search results even on “real time” data. Take the following example, a search for Google’s recent “Nexus One” phone, but here, we can filter the results to just show discussions:

If this is a topic that interests you, instead of just interacting with your direct friends you can actually go beyond your circle and interact with a wide variety of people based on your mutual interest in the Nexus One. Don’t just passively sit back and watch your real time firehose, actually roll up your sleeves and get involved, collaborate, keep in touch, and discover.

Nsyght offers some very neat Features:

• Web app for twitter and Facebook
• Support for multiple networks: Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Vimeo, Stumbleupon, Flickr, Last.fm, and Delicious
• Search your friends in real time – Update/Post, search, and filter your own personal firehose
• Easily RT/share things you find with your graph from twitter or even from other social services
• View discussions in threaded form and are searchable
• Updates appear and are posted in real time
• View videos and thumbnails inline and are searchable
• Be notified via email when someone replies to you, even if the reply came from twitter
• Register and login with your twitter or Facebook account

There is also a screencast here for more information: Screencast: http://vimeo.com/8215145

It will be interesting to see how these guys progress in the coming months, but thus far, it looks very encouraging – especially when comparing with the landscale as per below (source: Alexa / Quanticast / Crunchbase)

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Dear all, i hope you are well! So this will clearly be our last blog update for this year which will have been a busy one for us – many things have changed (for the best) at WAYN HQ, from a new site design, enhanced functionalities, a refocus on our global strategy and increased penetration in the Tourism and Travel industry where we have gained major accounts with Tourism Boards. But 2009 will have been a year where we will have spent most of our time listening to our users, and collecting as much feedback as we possibly could. We have improved the user interface of the site and have added many functionalities enabling richer interaction within the community. Our latest addition, “Activities” is testament of that. Users can now not only plan where they want to go but also express what they are into and meet fellow WAYN members based on similar interest:

Since launched on December 4th, the rise has been spectacular, with more activities being added day by day, up to 35,000 activities being added daily as of late.

We are going to add more functionalities to this service in the coming weeks to refine the product even further and allowing users to better see the “matches” they have with other users!

But 2009 will have also been a year of focus on our VIP Club – we have been working hard to bring more Lifestyle benefits to our VIP members by signing up key Global Partners and more are about to be announced by the end of January 2010 so watch this space! So far, VIP Members can benefit from:

• Exclusive access to Quintessentially Membership and win the James Bond 007 experience
• Free Global SIM Card – no more roaming fees on your phone when you travel abroad
• Auto upgrade on Car Hires worldwide with Hertz
• Free Lifestyle Card (worth £10) offering cheap travel money
• Send 100 Free International SMS per month
• See who likes you and others (New Feature)
• Unlimited standard Gifts, Super Rates and Say Hello’s
• Stand out from the crowd on search results
• Browse in secret and create private forums
• See who has read your messages
• Customize your WAYN experience (turn off advertising and customised profile skins)

As we realise that our VIP offering needs to be increasingly more compelling, we will be adding a number of benefits to our Lifestyle and Travel VIP Club which money simply can’t buy!

We are equally pleased to see the great growing trend in registrations – with more and more accounts being created every day – there are now nearly 10,000 of you joining the community each day, from over 193 countries – WAYN keeps growing and that’s the way we like it!

There is clearly plenty of exciting stuff coming up in 2010 which we will be announcing very shortly but for now, we would like to thank you for all the support you have given us throughout the year and would like to send you all our very best wishes for 2010!

Jerome, Pete, Mike

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