How we travel

Like everything, travel is becoming more social.  Tally-O is an iPhone app that lets friends create and share their own travel guides.

I’m flying home to North Carolina after a great weekend in San Francisco.  For me, one of the essential ingredients of an excellent trip is sharing experiences with friends.  When I’m traveling, I love to:

• Get tips from friends about where to go and what to do.
• Visit old friends and make new ones.
• Share trip photos and stories with friends.

Traveling is about discovering new places, adventures, ideas and inspiration.  These rewards are most meaningful when shared with friends.  That’s why I’m so excited about Little Green Software’s new iPhone app, Tally-O, which makes which makes sharing experiences easier than ever.  You can use Tally-O to:

• Share travel tips and adventures with friends.
• Connect with old friends and new ones through the places you’ve been.
• Share trip photos and stories. Each adventure can have maps, photos, and an interactive narrative.

When planning a trip, I always seek recommendations from friends before I look at a traditional travel guide.  A friend’s tips are much more credible and more personal than a guidebook that was written for a general audience.  After all, my friends know me! Who better to guide discovery of new places and experiences?

Say a friend is coming to visit your town.  Maybe they’ve been before or maybe it’s their first time.  They ask you to suggest ideas for how to spend their day.  These are the kinds of adventures Tally-O is all about.  Credible.  Personalized.  Destinations that the big tour guides miss.

For example… Friday afternoon my friend took me on a tour of the Richmond neighborhood in San Francisco and then we went to the beach.  We ate lunch at an amazing Burmese restaurant called Burma Superstar.  We had dessert crepes across the street at Genki Crepes and Mini Mart.  We took the bus to Ocean Beach and walked along the beach.  We explored these cool old ruins of a bath house that was built there in the 1920′s.  I took pictures with my iPhone as we went along, and later I created a Tally-O adventure called San Francisco Beachy Afternoon that all my friends can see.

Of course you can use Yelp or Urbanspoon to find a good restaurant.  And certainly I could have read about Ocean Beach in any San Francisco guide book.  But only Tally-O lets you combine these destinations into a personalized itinerary that can be shared with friends.  It’s a social travel guide.

How to create an adventure in Tally-O

1. Download Tally-O on the App Store.
2. When you’re out doing something fun, take lots of pictures with your iPhone!
3. Sign in to Tally-O with your Facebook account to create a new adventure.
4. Add destinations, descriptions, and photos. You can add trivia questions too for an extra challenge.
5. Publish the adventure and share it with your Facebook friends or with everyone!

How do you like to travel and discover new places? Let us know in the comments!