You will hear the term "Travel 2.0" a lot this year. It's the traveller's version of web 2.0 - the web's second boom. Everyone from Expedia to Eurostar is said to be developing a 2.0 strategy. But it's usually the small start-up companies that have the best ideas. Here are the ones to watch.
In exchange for information about you and your plans, 43places.com gives you tips and ideas from fellow travellers and friendly residents. It's part chatroom, part interactive guidebook. And why do they call it 43 places? That, say the site's founders, is the optimum number of places you should visit before you die.
43places might be great for meeting new people but what about keeping in touch with those you already know? Wayn, as its known to its friends, is like a travel version of Friends Reunited, inviting you to tag the places you've been to and keep in touch with the people you met along the way.
Do you want to take the sting out of Tokyo, the muddle out of Mexico City? The ability to "remix" the itineraries of people who have already done so might appeal. Triptie.com takes the trouble out of planning a trip because you can simply "borrow" an itinerary from the thousands of who've trod before you.
Flickr travel
Flickr is a photo-sharing site that is so much more than a place to upload your holiday snaps. It has become one of the most powerful online communities thanks to a clever geo-tagging system that ensures its millions of images are easily traceable. It is integrated with many travel sites, such as 43places.com and travel-library.com, and provides the images for thousands of independent travel blogs, which means you've probably seen lots of its images even if you have never visited the site.
Proving that Travel 2.0 doesn't have to be complicated, Paguna has reinvented the search page. Instead of clicking through page after page to find the deal you want (or not), Paguna uses something called Ajax programming to keep your search on one "dynamic" page. The search engine scurries away behind the scenes finding thousands of prices for you.
