Today, I’m happy to announce the MobiFriends travel community. Built in partnership with Mobissimo, MobiFriends is a social application that creates a next-generation online travel community for Mobissimo users.

Mobissimo visitors can share travel plans and deals, discover fellow travelers, trade tips on favorite hotels, restaurants, bars, museums and activities – all in the context of their travel search. Further, MobiFriends connects users to their existing social networks and lets them broadcast (optionally) their travel plans and deals back to relevant publishing networks like Twitter.

As Calley Nye points out on TechCrunch:

When traveling to a new city, what do you usually do first to find cool places to go to? Usually, you ask your friends. … Users can access MobiFriends from the widget on their personal dashboard, or on the search results page. The widget shows users their friends’ upcoming travel plans, recently reviewed locations, and their friends’ suggestions for favorite hotels, restaurants and activities in the location. Users are also able to share cheap fares, travel plans and favorite places with their friends … Mobissimo has several competitors in the travel search space, like Kayak and Uptake. While both sites offer reviews for locations, they lack the personal social network feature of MobiFriends. Reviews are extremely helpful, but they don’t compare to friends’ opinions …

The entire application is embedded on the Mobissimo site via widgets, and tightly integrated with the Mobissimo search engine to display relevant users (people on the same trip) and content (favorite hotels, restaurants, museums, cafes) on search results pages.

How does it work? The Thingfo platform makes it easy to build social applications for vertical markets - in Mobissimo’s case the application is specialized for the travel vertical. Where most social networking platforms create communities based on an affiliation with a partner site (I’m a member of this community!), Thingfo is an application-building platform that focuses the user activity on key activities defined by the partner site. The result is a more contextually relevant experience for site users and our partners.

Kristen from Mashable points out how this is new for online travel

What’s interesting about this is that there are a handful of sites that already have such community features for their travel planning and management services, but there aren’t many that have leveraged a seemingly unrelated (to travel, that is) network for the provision of a community.

In doing so with Thingfo in particular, Mobissimo layers in a redistribution factor that has yet to permeate the online travel industry and extends the networking potential of overlapping travel itineraries beyond those users that are within the MobiFriends network. By tapping into a user’s extended network, MobiFriends is also able to provide destination recommendations from existing trusted contacts, for suggesting things like restaurants or activities, based on your travel plans.

This is an exciting application, and I want to thank the Mobissimo team for their collaboration. We look forward to launching more social features as we get feedback from the community.

PS — Brian Solis put together a great gallery of screenshots from the app.  Check it out on Flickr, then join MobiFriends!