Calling for WAYN Gurus!

Right, am back! This time with some updates on a very exciting program we have been working on in the previous months being our WAYN Gurus! WAYN Gurus started with a massive online applications where over 50,000 users applied so clearly, this has taken us slightly more time to filter these through due to the massive response - thank you again to all those of you willing to help!

To reiterate, WAYN Gurus will be a team of specialist WAYN members, a select few in the key cities all over the world who will act as ambassadors for WAYN, providing advice and tips to members visiting their home countries and even being responsible for WAYN member events! Gurus will get Guru status and be top of the rankings for members wishing to meet people in countries they wish to visit or find out more about. So everytime you visit a particular city on the WAYN Travel guide or when making a search to find out who will be in a particular place at the same time as you, WAYN Gurus will appear at the top of the search results, allowing you to contact them and expect local tips on the destination you wish to visit. Clearly, nothing better than relying on real user's experience :)

We are now in the final process of testing the latest functionalities and hope to have this live just before the end of this month so watch this space! :)

To find out more about our WAYN Guru initiative, please visit our WAYN Guru profile here

Thanks guys and I will be in touch soon

Jerome

How to Search on WAYN

Well - guess what? There are MANY ways to search on WAYN - whether it is an extensive search, or a simple name search, we have it all :)

Let's start with a name search shall we? The name search is a simple way to search for someone you may have lost contact with: you can search by first, last name and email address. To access the name search, simply access the top Search section from the top toolbar and then click on name search.

Another search quite handy is the Full Search - it will provide you with more filters in your selection such as selecting members who are online, with a photo, and who have been or will be in a particular location - see below for a screen shot on how this looks - quick tip guys: in the From and Until fields, you can actually simply time: "today" or "next week" or "next friday" and the dates will simply get amended automatically - clever that! ;)

OK, one of my favorites: the WAYN Flight Search - Again, located within the Search menu. The Flight search will allow you to search all flights across the entire web and present the results in a consolidated format - apologies, the prices are only in USD for now but we will integrate more currencies soon!
Now is another interesting one: search for members in a particular location using the map!
the map is located under the Travel menu - then select the sub option: "Virtual Map". The map allows you to see where your existing friends are right now as well as seeing where other WAYN members are - the map below is a quick snapshot of where the WAYN population currently resides:


If I click on Australia, I will then be taken to a map of that country showing me where the WAYN users are in Australia - If I wanted to search within the Queensland area, this is how it would look like:

Clicking on Queensland will then take you to a Search Result page, displaying members in that area: in the example above, there are over 147,000 members so you may need to then apply search filters to narrow down your search further which will be shown above the search results page for example: narrowing down by gender, age group etc

Hope this proves useful!

Jerome

WAYN Desktop - for all your pictures!

As there are now over 1 million new pictures added each month, there is a tool available to all WAYN members called WAYN Desktop which allows you to scan all your photos on your PC and to upload them directly onto your online gallery - the benefit of the tool is 2 fold:

1 - the files get compressed as they are being uploaded which means the process is super quick!

2 - the WAYN Desktop sits on your PC tray at all times and will prompt you every time you receive a new message or when one of your friend comes online

Below is how the WAYN Desktop looks like for me: this is just a snapshot showing my pictures of a particular album on WAYN - you can tag, edit and share photos on the fly.

You can download your WAYN Desktop by going to the following link:

http://www.wayn.com/desktop

Enjoy!

Jerome

Privacy, Privacy and more Privacy!

As the community grows, I feel it was important to reiterate how you, as a user of the WAYN.com community, can make the most of your experience and control your profile and the messages / emails you receive.

This can be done in two ways:

Firstly, you can control all the emails you receive on WAYN - this can be accessed directly from your account by accessing the Privacy Menu - I have pasted a screenshot below so you can see how this can be done - very simple! just dont forget to save your changes when done ;)

Secondly - some of you may not like to receive emails from unknown source (although the essence of the community is to make new friends anywhere in the world ;) and you can therefore decide who to receive emails from - whether from your friends only or from a similar age group - it is up to you to decide! You can do so by accessing the Interactions Options, also contained with the "My account" menu - to define your interactions, simply click here!

I hope this will prove useful - we always want to improve your experience on WAYN and feel that by adding more and more filters to your privacy, we will achieve just that!

Have a good day!

J

WAYN Mobile and your friends on Linked In

So...Its 10.14pm and I am exhausted - time to go to bed but before, I thought I would add on here that WAYN is now fully mobile! you can add your next trips and let your friends know of your intended destinations on http://m.wayn.com directly from your handset! very simple :)

We only launched mobile just over a month ago and WAYN was already the 7th most popular community on the mobile according to a recent survey conducted by Nielsen Netratings.

As it was quoted:

Facebook is the most popular site for mobile social networking, being visited by over half a million Britons (557,000) from their mobiles, or 9% of all UK Mobile internet subscribers.

MySpace and Bebo follow, with a combined reach of 6.0% of UK mobile internet subscribers.

Mobile vs. PC - How the Leading Social Networks Compare

The four most popular social networks on the mobile are also the four most popular on the PC.

Travel social network WAYN has the strongest performance on mobile, ranking 7th on mobile internet compared with 21st on PC internet.

You can find more details on this survey here

Finally, I wanted to let you know that we have launched a service which will enable you to check who from your LinkedIn contacts are already on WAYN - the service is simple to use and will easily allow you to synchronise your LinkedIn address book with your WAYN address book and select the friends you wish to invite. The service is available here.

Thats about it for tonight guys - hope this will prove useful :) I will be back tomorrow with more updates, especially around trip synchronization and more features on your profile to give you more privacy control than ever.

Good night!

J

WAYN Interview with the Guardian

Our latest interview has been published online - this was done as part of the Toshiba Innovation Feature for the Guardian - here is the link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/video/2008/jun/23/wayn

I will post again tomorrow to provide some of our latest site updates and new services to come so watch this space :)

The top 5 essential travel items!

Hi everyone!

I hope that you enjoy reading our blog on what we are up to - thanks J for starting proceedings! Let's see how long this lasts ;) We will do our best anyway.

I thought that those of you following this may be interested in having a laugh and hearing us on the radio talking about a survey that we ran on WAYN whereby 7,400 of our users told us what they regard as their most eseential travel items!

The results were quite interesting in fact highlighting our need for technology, with the top 5 essential items being:

5: GPS device (good job we are location focused!) ;)
4: Camera (dont forget to add your pics to WAYN when your'e there or when you get back)
3: Laptop (really useful on the beach!)
2: MP3 Player (to drown out the sound of your kids, if you have some perhaps?)
1: Mobile phone (so you can keep your friends updated on where you are and where you're going next!) :)

The results led to national news coverage on all the major regional radio stations, as it coincided with the busiest day of the year for travel (according to the leading UK airports), being 25th July.

So for those of you that fancy a laugh and a giggle and want to hear our voices on the radio and find out what items we'd rather leave behind and take on holiday, and more interestingly, what some of you also thought were essential items (there are some funny ones in there!!), then check out the link below:

http://emediabox.co.uk/media/wayn_023md3932ccws394dka/

Cheers, and safe travels!

Pete